I primarily use DTP to track journal articles and archived websites. I want to be able to mark these up, add highlighting, commenting, etc, but I want the actual item left unchanged.
In other words, I could really use some annotation abilities (and presumably, highlighted words would be weighted more heavily in searches)…
You can add notes and comments in the Comment field of a document’s Info panel. That will not change the content of the document itself, but is fully searchable and is ‘attached’ to the document as metadata.
Highlighting would change the original document. Highlighted material, e.g. in RTF documents, is not preferentially weighted in searches.
That’s very much not the same thing. I would really like a replacement for marginal notes and a highlighter. I can create a set of notes outside the document in anything, that’s what I’m trying to avoid.
I guess when i say “change the document” I mean that I don’t want to edit the text of the document or anything, but I don’t really care if the on-disc file is changed just to add highlighting and comments.
What would be twice as awesome is if I could export or print just the highlighted passages and or the comments on them, but I realize that might be a quirk of the way I do research, and not a universal. 
I too would like to see something like this. I also archive journal articles and archive web sites for medical research. I like the idea of having the original unchanged document…if I want to send it to somebody without my notes or highlighting on it.
A separate “layer” that would allow highlighting in both RTF’s and PDF’s as well as a “margin view” to take notes it. After I read a journal article, and decide what’s important to me, I don’t want to have to reread the entire document to find the portion I was looking for. My margin notes and highlighting will give me the immediate info I need as well as the original document to clear up anything down the road.
The ability to emphasize these notes and highlighted areas would be an interesting category in the search menu. Prioritize highlighted areas or notes in the margin field.
This is how I do research as well when I’m working with hard copy. It would be nice to transfer the idea to DTPO.
I generally just make a copy of the document, throw the original in the appropriate group, and either screenshot (Apple+Shift+4) or copy the text layer. Then I can comment on it to my heart’s content.
But that does bring up another potential feature to DEVONthink Pro that I would like to see.
Journler (stop me if I’ve misremembered the application) stores each “entry” as a bundle that can contain multiple things. This is immensely bloating and useless for the DTP target audience, but it has a basically decent idea underlying it that would solve not only your problems but one of Bill’s (potentially).
If each document was allowed to consist of multiple layers, and those layers could be viewed (even in the Get Info window, but preferably next to the original document in a split view), then you could, say, fix the OCR/formatting errors of a PDF document like Bill wants. You could also annotate (using all of the strength of RTF) the original document however you like. It could be as simple as a third option to use the “See Also”/“Classify” drawer (not that we’ll necessarily have a drawer in DTP2).
Well, color me excited. I don’t know if the PDF thing is actually possible, since (as Bill pointed out) it doesn’t seem to exist in any applications already out there.
Eww!! That’s exactly what I’m trying avoid and what I mean when I say “I don’t want to edit the document”. I want my comments to exist on the original document.
PDF commenting definitely exists, you can do it in Acrobat, for instance. I strongly suspect DTP is using the Apple PDF Framework, which probably does not support that sort of advanced feature. However it certainly is possible - hence my feature request.
How to do it with RTF documents, I’m not sure, but the DTP people are likely more clever than I. 
I know – I’m just saying that I feel your pain.
They do use PDFKit. It does support annotation – open a PDF in Preview, stretch the window so you can see all of the toolbar, and click the pencil. Not fantastic, but it’s workable.
Print to PDF and then annotate it? If you’re annotating it, it should be read-only anyway.
I still like my idea of multiple text layers. It also makes a damn snazzy revision control system, potentially…
This sounds a lot like a feature request I made last year:
devon-technologies.com/phpBB … highlight=
John
This is one of the things that needs to be in DevonThink to be a replacement to pages for me. Pages does this amazing thing with Notes, you simply highlight a word and click note and off goes any text you want in the margin with a line drawn to it. This should be in DT as it is an information database. And would make it complete (btw I absolutly love this software and wouldn’t trade it for anything but this is one thing that I believe needs to be addressed in the next revision)
This is top of my list of features I need that isn’t in DTP. Preview’s annotations are no good because you can’t change them. The comments field (which seems to be Bill’s panacea for everything) just won’t cut it and as for kalisphoenix’s suggestion, let’s just say I believe computers are there to save me work not make me do extra. My feeling is that Adobe is mainly to blame. Is it just me or have they lost the plot when it come to pdf? In recent years they’ve touted the annotation features built in to reader but the default for every pdf already in existance is for the document to be locked for annotation, even though you aren’t changing the original document. For people like me who spend most of their time studying pdf’s of books and papers the absence of this type of functionality is a major usability crimp.