I use DT Pro Office for historical research. I collect and store many PDFs. Most are copies of documents such as personal letters, newspaper articles, and journal articles.
Here’s what I would like to do:
Imagine that in a group called “John,” I have a multi-page PDF of a text document.
I would like to:
open the PDF with Preview (from inside DT)
read the PDF to find the particular snippets of content that I most need;
When I see some lines of text in the PDF that I would like to save and store as a new, separate, smaller document, I would use “Grab” to select those lines of text from the original PDF. Then I would rename and save that “grabbed” section directly to the same group, “John,” that holds the original PDF.
I emphasize “directly.” I realize I could save the grabbed selection to my desktop or inbox, then rename it, then move the selection into “John.” But I’d like to reduce the number of steps between the initial “grab” and storage in “John.”
Can anyone suggest a specific method for doing this?
I cannot suggest anything to help specifically with how you are wanting to do this, but my question is why use Preview at all? I capture similar snippets directly in DT. I open a PDF in a new window, highlight the text that I want to capture, and drag the selection directly into the group where I want the snippet to appear. I usually then use the ‘Unread’ smart group to find all the newly created documents and quickly rename them to whatever I want.
Maybe I miss something here, but this seems to be quite easy:
Set the preferences to show the group selector when importing. Then use either rtf or plain text service to capture the snippets. DTP will present the group selector and remember it. So while reading you just select the text, hit a shortcut and return and you are done.