I have many PDF documents with Skim notes in them. I have also been reading
some of the discussions of various indirect ways of getting notes about a
document into DTP. Overall I like the idea of rich text notes, but not the
somewhat ad-hoc ways of getting these into DTP. So …
Is there a way to do any of the following:
(a) Find PDFs that have Skim notes in DTP
(b) Search Skim notes from within DTP
© Make Skim my default PDF reader/editor?
Just a recent DTP user … Thanks in advance.
DEVONthink can’t directly distinguish Skim-annotated PDFs from other PDFs, unless you tag them, for example.
DEVONthink uses Apple’s PDFKit for viewing/editing PDFs.
But you could designate Skim as the default application to open PDFs, in the Finder. Then the ‘Open Externally’ icon in the DT Toolbar will default to Skim, as will the ‘Open With…’ command.
Can’t help on your other questions.
Hi,
it is a pity, since DTP is already able to show Skim-note-content and thus is supporting part of the Skim-api there seems to be no way to extract/index that content within DTP. I really would hope for this functionality, the makers of Skim clearly offer the possibility to do this as BibTex shows.
Skims handling of notes and annotations of pdf-is superior to Apple’s PDF-Kit, which DTP is using.
Regards, Rolf
Not perfect, but Skim can export its notes into a .skim file. Import or index the .skim file. Or export Skim’s notes to .txt or .rtf or .rtfd. Import or index to DTP.
Hi,
well this is far from being useful, won’t links to the document annotated be lost in the process?
Correction: I should have mentioned BibDesk http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net/
which facilitates BibTeX… in my previous post.
I really (REALLY) would like the Devon-people to extend functionality of DTP(O) in this respect.
rRegards, Rolf
In short: No, No, and Almost (Cmd-Shift-O will open PDF in Skim if you have set Skim as the default PDF app in Finder).
DTP’s lack of support for notes about reference documents really surprises me, and I have not heard anything that suggests that will change.
Add me to the voices asking for deeper support of skim-notes. Showing the content of .skim-notes is very useful and appreciated; being able to (a) identify pdfs with notes and (b) search their content from within DTP and © index them would be even greater. Thanks for giving this some thought.
kithairon
I’d love to see this too. The current script-based workarounds for dealing with annotation are either broken or too clumsy to rely upon for heavy use. This would be a tremendous feature, as long as the notes were indexed.
Otherwise, just make the standard PDF text annotations indexable and call it a day.