Annotation colours

In the DT preferences we can set the labels for each annotation colour to something meaningful. These labels though don’t seem to get used anywhere though - not in the Annotations list in the inspector (only the colour itself is indicated) nor in exported annotations (via the Summarize highlights command). Unless I am missing something then the labels are completely redundant?

Is there a way to output this information with the highlights? Would be great for instance if our summarized highlights could be grouped by these colours / labels.

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These labels though don’t seem to get used anywhere though

Yes they do - in DEVONthink. People use these in DEVONthink just as they do in the Finder, as a visual indicator at-a-glance.

And no, the highlight names aren’t exported nor can a Summary document be produced with a sort by highlight color. Development would have to assess this. It’s the first request I recall seeing.

The label text content? How / where can it be seen / used?

The label text content?

No. This was not clear from your description. The names are a convenience item for your own identification. Just as in the Finder, they are not used in DEVONthink except as identifiers for things like smart groups and smart rules. The color is the important thing for a label color.

Not sure I could have been any clearer.

Anyway, this type of function is one of the key features (for me) of the app Highlights. If a future DT release could make these labels useful then that would be great.

+1 from me. I use Highlights app for exactly this too.

If DEVONthink could perform this action it would be really great. A chance we could see it?

Sorting the Document > Annotations inspector by type uses the color too.

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That is useful. But it is more to have the label text usable or visible in some way (i mean the label text that we can assign each color in preferences). At least for me :slight_smile:

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Yes. That is what I am looking for too. If I have renamed my colour labels to (for example) values such as Agree, Disagree, Further reading etc then it would be great if these were outputted somehow so that they are usable. e.g. to act as headers in the Annotation summary if we were able to group our annotations by colour / label.

But what happens when you change those label names again?
There would likely be out of date references or a confusion of colors and label names in the documents.
And updating the document text would not be a simple thing given it’s just strings you’re dealing with, not active links to labels.

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You have given us the ability to set labels but we can do nothing with them as it stands. They are completely pointless / redundant.

I (and many others) use an annotation system where different colours mean different things. If we can associate those colours with an appropriate label then that is very useful in the resulting notes (and it is something that we can do in Highlights app).

I should also say that it is a system that is not likely to change but if it did then i would accept the ramifications.

They are completely pointless / redundant

The label names are not pointless. Regardless if they’re shown in the way you’re describing, they are still useful just as the legend on a map is.

A legend on a map is visible and hence of use. This is exactly my point. The ‘legend’ for our colour coding is hidden in DEVONthink.

The legend on a map isn’t always visible. In fact, on digital mapping applications the legend is often hidden under and icon.

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My god. You are incorrigible.

Anyway….if the development team can consider adding this to a future update I’d be happy.

Over and out.

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Apologies if you feel that way. No disrespect was intended. I was just responding to your comment about label means being redundant or pointless, which is not the case for everyone.

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Just adding a +1 for sorting summaries by highlight color in some fashion. My workflow involves reading and highlighting many pdfs in a group with meaningful color categories, then summarizing my annotations to Rich Text. It would be very helpful to have that output sorted/grouped by highlight color, as Highlights app does.

My preference would be customizable or at least scriptable output from Summarize Annotations (grouped by highlight color, for example).

Summarize Annotations as Sheet is less legible but could get there if there were a column for highlight color. I do see in the Annotations part of the Inspector that “Type” column has the highlight colors and can sort by Type, so it would seem possible to group by Type in Summarize.

Thanks in advance!

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The request is noted, with no promises, of course :slight_smile:

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Just wondering whether this sorting should be applied to the complete document or to each page on its own. In the first case one might get grouped results having the same type/color from the beginning and the end of the document, maybe not always desirable.

Thanks to you both for the quick responses!

My use case is as follows. I get a large pdf document dump from a legal team, and review the pdf’s highlighting as I go, with color-coding for subjects like medical / growth / education / family history / testing / etc.

When I am done reviewing and writing my report in Word, it is so helpful to Summarize Annotations to RTF on all the reviewed files so I can reference my highlights and annotations on one document while clicking in the deep-links to go back to source if needed.

It would be very helpful for me if the different categories/colors I use for highlighting were grouped together in the large Summary file, so I could look at all the medical notes from various sources together, followed by testing, etc.

So for me, grouping by color/label, sorted from top to bottom of selected document list would be very helpful. Applying to the complete document or even multiple documents. I don’t mind and in fact like that they come from different parts of documents or even different documents.

In terms of format/styling (and this is entirely bonus/subjective), I might apply the highlight color’s label as a section heading highlighted in the color, then show the highlighted text excerpts without highlight color (more legible in the summary), with subsections for different documents, and the deeplinked page number following each excerpt in parens or brackets and highlighted in the color to remind me what section we are in.

From the forums, I have seen several similar requests to add this color-grouping feature (and formatting/scripting options), which is one of the attractions of the Highlights pdf app.

Thanks for thinking about it!

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