Best way for annotations?

There have been discussions like this

but please, can anyone say what is now in DT3 the most recommanded way to annotate files, especially PDF?
There is a lot of possibilities, but which one is the most recommended in order to find documents by personal annotations. Exemple: I have a PDF with very good explainations on “working with DT3”. Where is the best place to write “Interesting Document with explanations on DT3”?

There’s no best or recommended option for all scenarios.

E.g. annotating PDF documents has the advantage that the annotations are usable outside of DEVONthink and on other platforms. Finder comments support only text and are limited to the Mac. And annotations (see Annotations & Reminder inspector) are separate files and therefore again usable outside of DEVONthink and on other platforms but only linked together inside DEVONthink. And there’s now also custom metadata that could be used and supports both plain & rich text.

Personally I would just add a Finder comment in this case.

Where does DT3 put the annotation file, and could the path be firced to a special Dropbox PAth outside from DT3?

The annotation files are by default located in the Annotations group and have no specific path. But it’s possible to move them to other groups or databases.

is there a way to let them automatically copy in one dropbox folder? or to say to Hazel to do so?
Or even better, could it be possible to ask DT3 to store these files in the same folder where is the annotated file, outside from the database, inside the dropbox folder?

When it comes to document-level annotations, I tend to not use them. I do heavy usage of group tags and replication. So that “interesting document about DT3 usage” is represented in my system as group-tagging the doc with “Devonthink 3” and “Manual”.

When I want to capture more thoughts about a doc, I put the doc in a group with same name and add text file with my thoughts in it.

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One benefit of having DT3 keep the document annotations (from the right pane) as separate items as well as on the pane is that they can be combined via “Merge x documents” from the Tools menu. But it would be nice to have the option of having the combined file include the name of the item as well as the text of the annotation so that you can keep track of which went with which.

having the combined file include the name of the item

Are you referring to the name of the Annotation file that was merged?

Yes, the names of the several Annotations files that were merged.

First suggestion I’ve seen but it’s noted.

Is there a way for the Annotation files to have the same custom metadata as the associated pdf file?

This isn’t possible. Why do you want to duplicate the custom metadata?

Thank you for the suggestion of adding a text file to the doc and save as a group.

WHile playing around with your suggestion, I discovered that you can combine / merge the document and text file (your personal thoughts) into 1 file. You may have reasons to separate but I wanted others to know about the alternative possibility.