A new Bookends –> DT script with a group per reference

Done. Link in the original post. I’ve added tag sync back from DT –> Bookends, and made the script pretty independent (i.e. no custom Bookends format calls, just some slow Applescript string formatting).

I think this more or less does what I want now, but if anyone has suggestions or even better a diff for modifications they make I’m happy to keep updating.

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Thanks very much for making this available. I think having each note separate (but grouped) is a preferred method for many of us.

Works like a charm. Thanks for sharing it!

By the way, have you made any progress in pulling the notes out the PDFS and into DT3 as separate note files?

Still experimenting a bit. I’m actually considering going back to Skim for extracting the annotations. I’ve decided that I can just use PDFExpert to do the initial highlighting etc when reading on my iPad, and then extract the annotations in Skim. Or I can do something similar thing using the new Summarize features in DT 3.

But now that I’ve got a DT group for each bibliography item, I’m a bit more agnostic about the format of the notes, as I can easily find the notes.

I have also realised that it’s a great way to attach review articles to the original item.

Do you see any advantage in using Skim over PDF Expert to extract the notes?

Good point.

Here are my techniques for getting annotations out of PDF Expert on the iPad and into DTTG. The particular technique that you might want is the second Shortcut that I list. In this Shortcut each annotation is turned into a seperate text file within a new group that corresponds to the original files name.

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Nga mihi mo ena - he pai ki au

Actually maybe not. Esp with the Workflow above

Tēnā koe Lyndon. Ke te pai.

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I’m wondering if the script could be modified to extract annotations from Bookends itself, along with title, authors, citation etc (the existing import functionality)?

Script-writing is light-years beyond my experience.

Is this of interest to anyone else who might be willing to code it?

TY

Les

I’m having a problem with the script: Whenever I run it on a Bookends item (I keep the script in the Bookends script menu) and go over to DEVONthink to see it, I find a dot next to the name of the database, which presumably is to show that there is something new (although the number of items shown by the database name never increases). If I go to Today, I see new tags created by the script (though I don’t know where I would look for them once tomorrow comes). But I can’t find any actual files.
Does anyone have an idea where I might be going wrong?

An example of how to extract annotations (Note Cards) from Bookends and import into DEVONthink is here on the forum

I find a dot next to the name of the database, which presumably is to show that there is something new

This dot means there are unsynced changed and will disappear once the sync is finished.

I see new tags created by the script (though I don’t know where I would look for them once tomorrow comes)

In the Tags group of the Globals section of the Navigate sidebar, where Tags always live.

image

Thank you!

You’re welcome :slight_smile:

This script looks as though it might solve the problem I am trying to solve, and which I described in another post, so I have been trying to see whether this script works using DTP3. However I cannot get it to work. I edited the template to use what seemed the nearest template in DTP3, and created an empty database with the name Research and containing a group Library. However, I failed to get the script to run.

If I select a record where the date is written in the format used by Bookends as 1950-08-24, then I get the error:
error “Invalid date and time date 1950-08-24 of «script».” number -30720
I am running the script from Script editor, and it is not telling me which line the error is in. The other information is that in Bookends, it placed “August 24” in field user15. (I checked that user 15 and user 20 are fields I don’t use, so they should start out empty. And it created a Group in DTP that appears to be correctly labelled (author date title) but with empty properties and nothing in the group.

On the other hand, if I select a Bookends record where the date is year only, I get

error “Can’t get location of missing value.” number -1728 from « class DTlo» of missing value
in the line:
set theSummaryRecord to get record at ( the location of theTempRecord) & theSummaryName

I am a complete beginner at this, the nearest I have done being to dabble in Pascal programming around 30 years ago, so I am at a loss as to what to change to get the script to work. If anyone had suggestions I would be really grateful. Sorry to revive an old thread, but it seemed the right location to place the query.

I’m really late to this but have spent 8 hours today trying to newly optimize my use of Bookends (migrated from Papers this morning) and integrate DT for ongoing research and presentations. Of all the approaches, your use of separate groups for each reference article makes the most sense for my workflow.

I have it all working…but…the indexing of attachments. They never seem to show up in DT. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks!

Welcome @evanlockwood

Are the attachments stored in iCloud and only in iCloud? If so, this could be problematic as only locally accessible files should be indexed.

Yes, they are. They are located in iCloud Drive in the Bookends folder. That is the default for Bookends if you want to have iOS syncing capabilities…which is important to me.

Separately I have been able to index the entire folder in DT without any issue. There are about 3800 files and it only took about 30 min. I have been testing them and all seems to be well in this regard.

So the issue you were reporting is resolved?