I have been looking into Devonthink Pro at a suggestion by a colleague. Through discussions and experimenting on his machine, we stumbled onto something we could not understand and I thought I would drop a word here in case you could help. We were using version 2.5 of Devonthink Pro Office.
First of all, this is in the case scenario of simply indexing a folder on the hard drive, not importing any file into the database file itself.
We read somewhere (maybe in the revision notes, I don’t remember) that pdf keywords are used as tags automatically when the file gets indexed or imported by Devonthink. This is actually great because I could tag my pdf files in say Acrobat or Apple Preview and get the tags created for me automatically when later indexing in Devonthink. I discovered that I actually could even add keywords and other metadata to a pdf file directly in Devonthink using the Document Properties window. But the problem is that when I add these keywords to a document indexed in the Devonthink database, no tags are then created for the document even when I do an update on the indexed item (using the File menu or the shortcut Command-Option S).
The weird thing is that my colleague manages sometimes to get this done but not on a systematic fashion, and we haven’t been able to understand why sometimes it works and why sometimes it doesn’t. The same goes for rtf files for which keywords were created inside or outside of Devonthink.
It sounds like some of these files may have OpenMeta Tags already applied to the files and some not - hence the sporadic results. However, there is a script available called “Convert meta data to Tags” that should do as you wish. If it’s not in the Script menu (next to the Window menu), choose Script menu > More Scripts… to install it.
Thanks for the reply. This is typically what would happen.
Create metadata (mainly keywords) for a file (pdf or rtf). This is done either in Devonthink itself (in Document properties) or in another application. In either case these created metadata are there and visible to all other applications.
Do an update of indexed file on the given file in Devonthink, using the menu item or the shortcut Command-Option-S.
None of the created keywords, which are displayed by Devonthink in the Document properties have been converted to tags, meaning that no equivalent tags are created by Devonthink in the database.
I know nothing about OpenMeta standards. The keywords I am referring to are the keywords that can be added to a pdf file for example in Acrobat Pro or Apple Preview, or to an rtf file in a text editor such as Bean.
We were probably talking about two different things here: OpenMeta, which is a Mac OS X feature as is Spotlight; and metadata data that belong to the pdf or rtf standards and which are written to files and displayed by relevant applications such as Acrobat Pro and Apple Preview for pdf.
The script in question seems to import this kind of metadata as tags.
I have seen a post on here of someone complaining about the strange way that tags are displayed by Devonthink: on a single line with no scroll bar appearing when the line has been filled with keywords (by the way, same is true for the Document Properties window and also the Info panel). This is rather bizarre for a Mac OS X application. One has to keep the number of keywords down otherwise the only way to visualize them for a document in the interface is by clicking on the line itself and using the arrow keys to navigate in there…
