Hello,
Ok, DEVONthink is all new to me and I have what may be a simplistic question, but please help me. I want to be able to search for a keyword and get not just a list of documents that contain this word, but for each document get a list of occurrences within that document that I can then click on to bring me to a specific occurrence within the document.
At present, I only get a list of documents that contain the keyword, and then have to physically scroll through the pages of the document to locate the occurrences. Not only is this timing consuming and tiring (sometimes there are two dozen occurrences of the keyword/code term within a single document, and then there are dozens of documents…), but it more or less negates the whole purpose of the program for me – I generally know what’s in different documents, I have them divided according to folders, and what I really need to be to search for and review are occurrences BOTH within, and across these documents.
Any advice would be hugely appreciate, thank you sincerely for your time!
I’m not sure this will answer your question, but…
When I want to search for words within a DT document, I click in the text and press command-f.
This technique works in most Mac programs including Safari. When you want to search for pages in the web, enter the terms in the Google search field. When you want to search within a found web page, press command-f. At least that’s the way it worked until the recent release of Safari 3.0 beta – I prefer the old way.
I’ve been searching for the answer to this, too. I have a collection of PDF of 80 pages each in my database. I would like to find my search terms within each doc – and however many times that terms appears.
Is there any way to do this, other than to make each page of the PDF a separate doc?
thanks.
Open a PDF in Preview. Enter a search word, and a list displays each occurrence of that term in context.
That’s currently not possible in DT, but perhaps a future enhancement of Apple’s PDFKit will provide a similar ability using PDFKit.
The workaround until then is to invoke Open With and select Preview, or choose Launch Path if Preview is the default application to open PDFs.
Thanks so much for solving this – I thought I was going mad. I have found that Preview cites every instance of an occurrence; however, I’m hoping to have a master index of every page of twenty-plus years of our fine UFO Magazine.
Do you know of any other way I can prepare my files? They start out as Indesign files. Is there anything I can import them to so that DT will index every single word? Straight text won’t work because there are all sort of captions, pull-quotes and text fragments on any laid-out page.
A proper index would be so great to have …
TIA