Hi folks, I have been able to block in passages of pdf documents and copy them to plain text or rich text notes inside devonthink, but one continuous passage at a time. Is there a way inside of devonthink to highlight multiple passages and have all of them copied out to a plain text or rich text note?
You can drag selected text out of a PDF into a DEVONthink group where it is stored as RTF.
Or, check out the Highlights app, which is very good for annotations, will recognize highlights you made in DEVONthink, and can export each highlight as a .markdown (plain text) note back to DEVONthink.
Hi - exactly how does one do this with multiple highlighted sections in one document?
Not with dragging. That’s why I suggest Highlights. Another option is Skim. Both of these have been discussed at detail in the forum – if you search you’ll find more detail already posted by readers.
Using “open with” skim, highlighting and exporting to rtf and importing back seems to work nicely - albeit for a few steps. Thanks!
[quote=“korm”]
You can drag selected text out of a PDF into a DEVONthink group where it is stored as RTF.
Sounds simple enough. Tried it with the three tools and none provided the effect. What’s the secret? 
korm’s comment is pre-Sierra. The changes Apple has made to the PDFKit has broken many things with PDFs, including this functionality. You can still copy and press Command-N to create a new record with the clipboard data. Not this may not keep the appearance, but the text will be preserved.
Also, note this is broken in Apple’s own Preview and other apps using Apple’s PDFKit.