Easy Highlighting

Devonthink is an awesome program and I barely scratch the surface of what it’s capable of doing. But I’m looking for a more efficient way of highlighting.
I use Devonthink to capture information from multiple sources. I then highlight that information with my own color scheme so that i can instantly get the information I want without reading through the entire article again.
But the process seems to be more difficult than it should be. I want to be able to select a highlight color, and then just highlight each occurence without having to select highlight each time. Ideally, I’d like to be able to just drag my cursor across the text and have it highlight in the color i have already selected.
Kindle Reader does this perfectly. You select text and a color chart appears above it. With 2 clicks i does 2 things. 1. It highlights that text, and 2. It keeps that color as your highlight color for next time.

I’d be willing to pay for this as an add on.
Any ideas on how to do this, or any thoughts to adding this simplicity to Devonthink?

Thanks
Richard

What kind of document do you highlight? By the way, clicking the highlight icon in the Editing bar is also sufficient, only a long click opens the popup to select the color.

You can highlight via Shift-Command-L after you selected text.

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Thanks. That helps a lot. I was right clicking and selecting highlight each time, and then selecting the color each time. I didn’t have the editing bar visible, so that’s a big help.

Thanks again. :slight_smile:

Despite the shift+command+L shortcut, the highlighting feature needs work. Changing the default color requires too many clicks and excess navigation with the cursor. There’s also no way to see which color is currently defaulted. And, right clicking on a highlight does not actually allow you to change the color, despight listing various color options… you have to go up to the toolbar for that. My dream would be for the developers to create a highlighting feature similar to Diigo… with an option for highlighted text to automatically trigger a list of highlight colors. Furthermore, an option to #tag individual highlights / notations for pulling information together from across multiple resources–that’s powerful. #devonthink #devonthink:feedback

Any plans for improving the highlight workflow? See my post below.

That’s a new feature of Catalina, not one of DEVONthink. And unfortunately like many other things on Catalina it’s broken.

That’s a shame. Is there a way to set hot-key for specific colors? Like F1-6?

The set hotkeys in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. I have used this in-house for years.

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Wow, thanks so much! Problem solved :smile:

You’re welcome.

And if you want to go a step beyond that, you could use Keyboard Maestro and a Stream Deck for your color palette and any other shortcuts you want to program.

Very cool… love it.

So, shortcuts work great… but now my highlights aren’t showing up in the annotations inspector. It shows a long list of annotation “type” and associated color, but no “content.” I tried restarting DT, and summarizing the highlights. The summaries are also blank. Any solutions?

Could you send the original PDF document to cgrunenberg - at - devon-technologies.com? Thanks.