I am new to Devonthink, but am a longtime user of Skim. One feature I loved about the latter program was its ability to ‘save notes’, which would take all pieces of highlighted text in a pdf and copy them to a textfile. In this way, highlighting a document and taking out important chunks of text (an important part of my research process) to save in another file were wrapped up on a single step; rather than highlighting, then copying and pasting individual excerpts to another file one by one. Is there any way to write a script to do something like this?
Most of the files I’m working with are PDFs, however. Is there any way to do this with PDFs?
Sorry, RTF was the wrong example.
DTPO scripting cannot at this time access DTPO annotations.
However, for a quick and dirty option, you can open a DTPO-annotated PDF in Skim, while there use File > Convert Notes, and then File > Export to ship the notes back to DTPO as an RTFD document**. Be careful not to save the file while in Skim, else your DTPO annotations will no longer be editable in DTPO.
Skim is very scriptable, so the above could be automated. Or use Keyboard Maestro, etc., maybe.
**5/1 Skim also has extensive support for export templates that contain custom formatting of notes and other elements. See the Skim wiki for more information.