No it no longer exists. The purpose of the original notes pane was to allow editing of the selected text before it was put in the annotation. This seemed superfluous. If the original selected text needs to be edited, the annotation can be opened. (If people would really like the integrated notes textfield back as an option I would consider adding it)
When nameinTile property is ‘true’ the default name for the annotation is the name of the source document. When nameinTitle is ‘false’ the default name for the annotation is the first few words of the selected text. The number of words of the selected text that are used is given by the maxWords property.
Unfortunately I cannot get this to work, when I activate the script I get the annotation pane but the date and time are incorrect and if I accept that date I get an error message saying that it is incorrect. If I change the date and time to the correct one I still get the same message. Any ideas?
Thanks for your answer. I hear you about the notes pane seeming to be superfluous. I did use it, though, as a way of typing follow up notes / questions that related to particular tagged text. Yes, I’d love to have the notes textfield back, but I really don’t want to put you out. You’ve already done a lot for us, Frederiko. I’d be happy to consider a “hack” solution for a notes textfield, if there’s a way for me to achieve what I’m seeking to do (i.e., including follow up notes / questions for the tagged text). Thanks so much…
Ok, gotcha. I’ll make the changes - switching it to the latter - and will report back if there are any problems. Thanks so much again for including that option. It’ll seriously save me a TON of time and hassle!
There is now a configuration property ‘sidePanel’ which if set to ‘true’ will bring up a side panel to edit the selected text. Be aware however that because of the limitations of the textfield the text conversion won’t be as accurate as when the side panel is not used. Certain character such as " and #s will not appear in the side panel
The date and time shown in the annotation pane are the date and time of the creation date of the source document (not the current time) in the iso order - year, month, date and time.
v302 should fix the problem you are having and the annotation document’s creation date should be set to the time in the annotation pane.
v302 reloads the default configuration file so you will have to redo any changes you made to the properties.
When I move into Scrivener the notes taken with this script, I have the link to the pdf, but not the link to the annotation itself that I wrote, which I certainly need. Am I missing anything here or wouldn’t it be good for such a link to be included in the body of the note as well?
I’ve noticed that the page number in the prefix to the title of the note sustracts one to the pdf page number. However, the link inside the body of the rtf annotation is the same as the pdf page number. I am thinking of modifying it but, being such a carefully thought out script, I suspect there is a good reason for it. Though I don’t get it.
How are you putting the annotations into Scrivener - copying and pasting or importing?
Very interested generally in DT ↔ Scrivener workflows
You can always go back to the original annotation by using the ‘annotation group link’ in the rtf and then choosing the annotation from there. Point taken however and I will see how a link back to the original annotation can be inserted into the rtf.
You are correct. This is an inconsistency I plan to rectify.
Neither of them. I drag the note from the Annotation Pane and drop it in Scrivener’s reference panel for links. There they are clickable and conveniently viewable with quicklook whilst I am in the outliner view.
The problem with this is that a later manual change to the file name will disconnect the link -what gets now linked in the reference pane is the file path (file:///) not the hyperlink (x-devonthink-item://).
Having a DT hyperlink inside the annotation will make it easy to locate the file when its name has changed due to later modification and refinement of the annotations in DT.
Only in the body content of the annotation. For the link when clicking the file name, Annotation Pane does well using a path link. Unlike hyperlinks, path links can be viewed with quicklook, and this is very convenient in Scrivener’s reference pane.
I also wonder if it would change any of the workings of this great plugin to move groups and texts folders manually to a new database, and the annotations in the groups folder to external folders. Keeping them in another database, separated from the long pdfs they link to, might be better for DT’s See also. And keeping them externally, they’ll be accessible to Spotlight
Also, and only it doesn’t change its workings either, if it would it be easy to change the Annotation Pane’s script for the groups folders to get the name from the pdf they refer to, instead of their DT’s hyperlink.
I played around a bit with Scrivener’s reference pane and I can’t find a good solution. The problem is that when the file name changes Scrivener will not be able to find the file and hence a link to the original annotation in the text will be of no use. The best I can suggest is adopting a strategy of flagging or labelling any files whose links are put in Scrivener to alert you not to change the name.
This would not work for a number of reasons. Thanks for the input though, the point you raise is very valid. For this reason v303 turns off the classification and indexing of the annotations in the groups folder. They are effectively invisible to DT’s indexing and classification. The groups folders take almost no space at all because they contain only replicants.
Turn on “create spotlight index” in the database properties to make the database searchable by spotlight.
Maybe I have missed a use case but the groups folder in intended to be effectively invisible. There is no good reason to get a source document’s group folder by going to annotations/group. The way to get to a source document’s group folder is through the source document’s url link.
Thanks for taking the time to give input jmm (and those of others in this thread and who have emailed me). It has been invaluable in tracking down bugs and in producing a help file which should hopefully be in a future version.
I have some observations to make, not as a negative viewpoint but as a contribution to improve this great tool.
1. v303 - some problems 1.1 - “side panel”
First, the number of selected words is limited. Some of the text is missed and not appear on side panel.
Secondly, some of the characters not appear. Not only special characters as " or # but all the punctuation. 1.2 - annotation/notes field
Remains the problem with the paragraphs: unlike the version v2, the result is a continuous phrase with the expression “[return]” in the paragraphs’ place.
2. a useful extra field
In some cases we work with a reference manager. These references have some important information. Thence, I ask if is easy add a new field in the Annotation Pane (optional) to introduce the link to the reference. For example, Bookends or Papers (Endnote no) have the feature that allows create a “link” to access to the reference.
3. Keystroke
Once you said:
I’m a newbie not only in DT but also in the mac world… and in System Preferences>Keyboard I didn’t find any reference to this script! How to create this keystroke?
Hi, Paulo. I can reply to the above question. You first open the Automator app, choose Service and put the script into a Run AppleScript action. Later, open System Preferences, choose Keyboard settings, go to the Shortcuts tab and in Application shortcuts, assign the hotkeys, as it is graphically explained here.
Alternatively, you can use any launcher that supports executing AppleScripts and setting global hot keys, such as FastScripts.
Thank you, Frederiko. Points taken. I’m now tagging some annotations to indicate their name should not be changed. I have also turned Spotlight on in the DT database properties, which I think it allows searches in ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/ The problem with this is that files there are devoid of tags -my main organization criteria in DT.
Just in case it works for Paulo as well, I will mention that I tag all annotations with their Citation ID from my reference manager. When I select the citation tag I get a view in which it is possible to browse, read and write in the annotations without many clicks. The same view I would get from the annotations’ group folder (as Three Panes, Widescreen). I find this view more confortable to work with than the icons’ view reachable from the annotations’s source documents’ link. I include an image.
Since I don’t know much about DT’s AI, I wonder if it makes a real difference to restrict pdf file names to their short citation ID, although I always forget which title Author Year stand for. The thing is that when searching, annotations will come up due to the wordings of the descriptive pdf titles they include in their text content, although particular annotations may not focus on the searched topic at all.
For the same reason, I also wonder if long pdfs and short annotations should be kept in different databases.
I didn’t realise this but I tested it and you are correct. The alternative might be to put annotations in an indexed file which would make the keywords available to spotlight.
A newly created group inherits its window style (icon, column split, three panes) and the viewable columns from it parent folder (when opened as a separate folder). This makes it very important to set up the folder structure carefully before you start, if like me, you use different views for different folders. So instead of the icon view that you are seeing when you select the annotation group from the source link, I have the folder set up to show me a split view with only the relevant columns open that I need. This is done by setting up the correct view in the annotation/groups folder.
It is probably because I am not following your methodology properly but your system seem on first glance to be quite clumsy and not conducive to easily finding information.
I would set it up a little differently :-
The title would be the name of the pdf document
The author and the year would be tags, or parent folders
The annotations title would reference something relevant to the annotations, such as the first few words of the selected text. This would help in search and AI to identify the relevance of a searched document
The full citation should appeal in the annotation text so there is no need to reference this information from the source document
I use my folder structure to automatically generate the citations while I am writing in OmniOutliner using variation of this script: [url]Cite&Write with OmniOutliner]
Just a suggestion because when I was in academics reference managers hadn’t been invented yet.
Reference back to the citation manager
Paulo mentioned that a reference back to the citations manager (such as Endnotes, or Bookends) would be useful. I don’t have any experience with citation reference managers so I am going to experiment and see how best to create a link back to the citation manager. This would seem to be the best answer to jmm’s problem too.
@ Frederico: I was also in academics before citation managers had been invented, churning out bibliographies and course suyllabi that were funded and distributed by the National Science Foundation.
But at least we had advanced from clay tablets to shoeboxes of index cards containing handwritten information.
I’m also an enthusiast of Annotation Pane. To the point of convincing me to come back to DT. I’m slowly moving my data from good but inflexible Atlas.ti and MaxQDA, so I still have a tendency to rely more on structured organization than on freer search.
The problem I had of getting the icons’ view was due to not searching from the top most folder, i.e. Inbox, but from the annotations’ groups or text folder. I record my mistake here in case another user experiences the same.
Another convenient way to quickly browse annotations is Cover Flow, but DT doesn’t seem to focus rtfs as immediately as Path Finder.
As for the reference manager, thank you for your consideration. All I need from it is the citation ID, which I already have in DT, both as a tag and at the beginning of the pdf’s title. Therefore, even if I ever want to have a look at a record, I don’t see it as a significant part of my workflow.
Thank you as well for sharing your methodology, Frederiko. What you have described is not too different from mine, what may not be clear because of the language. The main difference might be that I include a good number of keywords in the annotation title, so that I can search in Spanish as well if the source document is in English. As a side note, I think it would make a big difference to newcomers if DT made available a few videos not only about the functions but about real power uses of the app.
I have moved externally the text folder to have it indexed. And back again inside the database when I’ve realised I shouldn’t risk loosing the hyperlinks among annotations I include in some of them.
Maybe as a result of the above, now the new annotations I make have their properties set to be excluded from Classification, Search and See also. I’ve checked that both the annotations’ texts and concerned group folders are not set to exclude. Any idea about how I could change this behavior?
I understand why you got an icon view. One of the placeholders in the rtf is %annotationGroupLink%. This places a link in the rtf called ‘Source Document annotations’. Clicking ‘Source document annotations’ will display an icon view of the annotations tag group which is not very helpful in this context. Instead try right clicking on ‘Source Document annotations’ and selecting open link. This will open the annotation tag group in a new window and respect the layout settings of the group. The way devonthink layouts interact can be complex because of all the permutations.
You should not lose the hyperlinks if you move the rtfs into an indexed folder but I haven’t tested it extensively so I can’t recommend it.
No, it wasn’t anything you did. There was a bug in the code which I have fixed in v305. To fix the exclusion simply select all the annotation texts and and choose ‘show info’ from the right click menu. From there you can reset the properties of all the selected files at once.
