Annotation Pane (Annotation with Links, Notes, Tags v3)

[Frederiko]

@mmm

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Frederiko