Feature request: handle long path names

[notuntoward]

It turns out that my evernote notes have a lot of very long paths. The default path limit for windows is 260 chars; for oneDrive, it's 400. I've enabled Windows long path handling, but it turns out that Obsidian itself can't handle long paths.

A nice feature would be, on import, to shorten long path names, and then fix any links to them.

[AltoRetrato]

This is something I've faced and had to manually fix on some of (very few) notes of my own.

Unfortunately, automatically reducing / truncating a file name can be a lossy operation, and is something I want to avoid. For example, I had a note with a very long title (and thus long file name as well), with attachments names somewhat like these:

• Study Record and Japanese course certificate - Self-study Course - Marugoto (Katsudoo and Rikai) A2-3
• Study Record and Japanese course certificate - Self-study Course - Marugoto (Katsudoo and Rikai) A2-4

IIRC, both the import plugin and YARLE truncated attachment file names at 50 characters, and so all files ended up with a somewhat exact same prefix followed by a (1), (2), etc., and there was no way to know anymore which file was which. Other filenames also had some important information included in the file name but not anywhere else. That automatic truncation was one of the first issues I tried to fix on the import plugin before writing evernote2obsidian.

I understand that automatically shorting file names could be an interesting feature for you and other users, but I'd rather avoid adding features that users might not understand at first and end up losing information or data.

Alternatively, at the moment, you can set Max. path length (default: 256) in the Configuration menu to your preferred value and Scan selected notebooks for issues. If any absolute path is greater than that, it should show up in the log as "[{note.title}] Exported attachment path will have {len(full_path)} characters: {full_path}". Manually renaming the note titles in Evernote was easy and fast.

FWIW, the longest path name I have in my vault has a full, absolute path of 183 characters. I even created an "artificial" note titled "Note with very long title and very long attachment file name to test the Obsidian Import Plugin limits and possible patch to avoid truncating attachment file names when importing", and with a full path of just 218 characters, it works fine on my Windows setup.