After lots of help from Bill the situation is now that I’ve copied all three CD volumes of MEN to my desktop, each in its own folder. Then these three folders are indexed in my DT Pro. That’s fine except the big limitation is that we can’t do phrase searches on indexed volumes. We also realized that out of 50 some K files on those three CDs, we probably only need about 1000.
Searching the CD folders on my hard drive outside of DTP with the MEN search mechanism is terrible because all it does is search for all words in the search box.
So what I’m thinking is that with the help of things like context etc within DTP and a bit of time and patience and solid thinking, I could probably find the vast majority of the articles I’m after.
The idea would be to get them into DTP in their entirety and then get rid of the approx. 49K files that are indexed.
So my question is, within DTP, when I have an article in the DTP browser, what is the best way to capture it into my DTP database so that it resides there as a real file, not something indexed to my HD. I don’t have to worry about preserving any links because although these are html docs and images, they’re from a magazine, not a web site, and there aren’t any links to worry about.
Three approaches come to mind. They depend on making a second capture into your database when you are viewing a file that you consider important. I’m assuming that these are HTML files copied from your CD to your hard drive. I think all will work with local (on your HD) Web pages, but I haven’t tried this out.
[1] While viewing a page, click in the background and Control-click (or Right click), then choose the contextual menu option to capture the page. This capture will be Phrase-searchable, but will require you to leave the CD file copies on your HD to access images. Then you can delete the Index-imported copy from your DT Pro database.
[2] While viewing a page, click in the background and Control-click, then choose the contextual menu option to capture as a Web Archive. Same as [1], but you will have imported the images as well, and I’m pretty sure you could delete or move the CD-copy file from your HD and still view the images. (Pretty much the same as going offline.)
[3] While viewing a page, select the text/images you wish to capture, Control-click, then choose the contextual menu option to capture a note. I know this will work. You could delete the CD-copy original from your HD with no worries. The capture will be fully searchable, and will not be affected were you to remove the CD-copied original from your HD.
All three capture modes above would result in a more recent Creation Date than your Index-imported files. By sorting by Creation Date, you can “separate” these captures from the original imports. Or use Tools > History to identify them by age (they will be newer than your first set of imports) and export them, then import them into a new database. With lots of persistence, you could eventually browse through the collection and end up with your most important 1000 or so Phrase-searchable documents.
All that said, remember that Christian noted that DT Pro veersion 2.0 will make some changes in Index import search capabilities. No promises, but just maybe you would be able to do Phrase searches on your existing DT Pro database, or possibly make a new Index import from your CD-copies on the HD. So the importance and timeliness of Phrase search capability on your documents can only be assessed by you.
I really don’t see much potential for automating a re-capture scheme, as you indicated that only about one-fifth of the files would be of interest to you, and I suspect you would have to make a lot of judgments file-by-file.
Thanks for all the ideas and instructions about getting the job I need to do done. It’s extremely helpful. Also thanks for reminding me about v. 2 and some possibilities.
Right now I still have loads of info to enter into the db, so what I’ll do is focus on doing that and then seeing whether when I’m done version 2 is here and if it is, if it has the feature I need.
If not, however, with your advice, I’ll have a definite plan of action.
Well, I think I’ve come across a way to make the searching of the MENews on my drive a lot easier and much more productive.
What I’ve done is to download DEVON’s EasyFind. I’ve removed all the 30 volumes of indexing from my database. Then, using all the features of EasyFind,
I’m searching the volumes on my hard drive using all the great searching available to me in EasyFind that wasn’t available in DEVONThink Professional because of indexing and wasn’t available on the MEN discs because they just didn’t have it. Now using the advanced searching capabilities of EasyFind, I can locate what I want and then just capture it to my data base.
