With DT2 pb2, I decided it was finally time to start taking proper notes in my life. But I’m not sure about some things:
If I select Data -> New -> Rich Text or Data -> New -> Plain Text, it creates a new note for me. But how can I get to the body field via keyboard? Nothing obvious seems to work, and I don’t see a menu item for it either.
What’s the best way to store title-less data, like quotations? I want to be able to see them in a list, but I also want to take advantage of hyperlinks, styles, etc. at some point. Is there a way to automatically summarize and put it in the title? Or some way to link the title field to the body, so I can see the same data in both places? Or something else?
I’m just the average Copy&Paste Scripter - but this script should set the text of an item to the name of this item (works also for a selection of items):
tell application id "com.devon-technologies.thinkpro2"
activate
try
set this_selection to the selection
if this_selection is {} then error "Please select some contents."
repeat with this_item in this_selection
set item_plaintext to plain text of this_item
if item_plaintext is not missing value and item_plaintext is not "" then
set the name of this_item to item_plaintext
end if
end repeat
on error error_message number error_number
if the error_number is not -128 then display alert "DEVONthink Pro" message error_message as warning
end try
end tell
I think one can attach a script to a group, so perhaps you can figure out a way to execute this script for every item you drop into the quotations group…
That’s an interesting idea… in fact, it could be a way to more generally capture the “context” of a quote. I’ve been musing about the best way to tell DT “I just highlighted this interesting quote on a web page; clip it, with hyperlink, citation, etc.”
I wonder, though: Am I using it wrong? Given the amount of researchers using DT, there must be people who clip quotations. How do you organize them, title them, save their citation?
I do save quotations in DevonthinkProOffice (still using v 1.5.4), either as separate clippings, or by copying and pasting them into DTPO docs with a subject heading, “Quotations about XYZ”.
The discussion of using scripts to title the items puzzles me, because if I save a clipping, Devonthink automatically uses the first few lines as the title. I checked just a couple, and found one with 46 words as the title. Generally I choose to shorten this when I go through the things in my incoming stack, so that the most telling words are shown rather than being truncated for lack of space.
Does v. 2 not use this titleing method?
I do not use auto-classify for my incoming stuff, so I go through and manually assign quotations, and all other items, to groups. I use the “Classify” suggestion feature, which works great with most items but not for quotations because I want to keep them separate. I have a folder of quotations including documents of qs on certain subjects, so I want them all in there rather than having, say, quotations about LIbraries being in a folder containing articles about Libraries.
I think it’s a Firefox vs. Safari thing, not a v1 vs. v2 thing. Apparently, Safari works much better with “Services” than Firefox. So if you browse with Safari and clip part of a page, DEVONthink can tell the URL, the title, etc. and make a nice appropriate Rich Text entry. I use Firefox, and it’s a mess. (There are some long-standing open bugs on Firefox, but even basic plaintext services won’t be supported until after Firefox 3.5.)
But: Turns out there’s a nice Firefox add-on called Safari View, which adds a “View This Page In Safari” link to any page. If I see something I want to clip, I just open the page in Safari, and clip from there to DTP.