All words in the concordance (Wortliste) are capitalized

Why are all words in the concordance (Wortliste) are capitalized? Especially strange, because DT is made in Germany. It is essential in German language to make a difference between capitalized and non-capitalized words.
As a wish for the next upgrade: Leave the words as they are in the text they are taken from. Would be helpful.

Regards,
Oliver

DEVONthink searches are not case-sensitive for words, although the operators in queries (AND, OR, NOT, BEFORE, etc.) should be entered in upper case.

This convention greatly improves search speed while minimizing memory requirements.

Case-insensitivity is easy to test. Select a document. In the upper-left corner of the preview pane click the “Words” icon to open the words panel. Click any word in that panel and you will see all instances of the word highlighted in the document, regardless of case (All, all, ALL, aLL, and so on).

I’ve never seen that requirement and find it curious. Are you suggesting that the DEVONthink parser that feeds Boolean search can make errors if the wrong case is used for search operators? Or are you suggesting this because it’s a convention that makes search queries more human-readable?

Use of upper case for the Operator terms in queries is a syntax convention, discussed in the Help and User Documentation appendix on Search.

For example, enter before in lower case, and it will be treated as a term to search for. Enter BEFORE in upper case, and it will be treated as a proximity operator.

Actually the case doesn’t matter. “a before b” is identical to “a BEFORE b” or “a Before b”.

Thank you for the discussion.
I have the feeling, that the answers are going in a different direction.
My question was about the pure word list.
The word list converts the first letter of all words with a small letter of a text into a capitalized letter.
For German language the word list therefore is a bit useless, because e.g. “sie” and “Sie” can have a different meaning. Look at the attachment: If I want to know the frequency of the word “sie” I cannot know this, because all “sie” are capitalized.
May be I would’t ask, if the software would be produced in the US, but as German software programmers I guess you are aware of this problem. So my whish, again, is: Leave the words in the list as they are in the text they are taken from. :wink:
capitals.png

Yes, we are talking in different directions.

If case sensitivity were employed in the Concordance, the size of the Concordance would grow greatly, That would have consequences for performance of searches and the AI assistants in DEVONthink.

Your example of Sie and sie in German can be matched in other languages. In English, for example, Miller might be a last name of a person, and miller might designate a person’s vocation - but that case distinction would become ambiguous were the term to be capitalized at the beginning of a sentence - as is normal in English. :slight_smile:

You are correct that dropping case sensitivity in the Concordance does blur some distinctions in use of terms. But it has significant advantages in the memory requirements for DEVONthink. And it means that, in my example, a search for miller can return instances such as Miller, miller, MILLER, mILLer, etc. covering a range of uses and typos.

That has consequences for design of queries. For example, if I’m looking for mentions of a John Miller, I would probably write the query as:
“john miller” OR “miller, john”
to include most of the common references to that name. As it’s rather a common name, I might further filter the list by adding a term related to a specific person’s field, for example.