first, I’m enjoying your DevonThink Pro program very much!
But there is a problem I cannot figure out: my folder structure in DT is nearly the same as the one in finder. I create in DT a folder e.g. “Politics”. Then I indexed (because to import needs to much time starting the program) my real “Politics” folder from my HD. Why? Because to see in DT my created .rtf’s like citations, thoughts etc., which I don’t want to have in my real “Politics” (main) folder.
I wish to have them in a supdirectory like /Politics/DevonThink.
But creating new .rtf documents in “Politics” folder in DT, it is saved in /database/“specific folder”/ … .rtf.
Can I change this path? Via tools > information it is impossible, unfortunately.
Many thanks in advance for your help/explanations!!
Karajan
If I understand correctly what you are wanting to do, you can do, or have already done, the following:
Index the ‘Politics’ in DEVONthink to view the documents in the database that are still located in the Finder.
Create a group in DEVONthink and nest it under the Politics group (Politics>DEVONthink). The DEVONthink group will not appear in the Finder, and the notes added/created in this group in DEVONthink will only be available when the database is open. However, the AI in DEVONthink will work better if you do not mix documents and groups in the same group. A better structure would be to have a structure that looks like this:
The Politics Documents group contains only groups-in this case the indexed Politics folder (shown with the upswept arrow to indicate that it is indexed) and the Politics Notes group that is in the database.
Now if you want to created documents in the indexed Politics folder and save them back to the Finder, select the documents in DEVONthink, right-click, and select Move to External Folder.
This will move the document to the Finder, and then index it back into the database.
Thank you very much for your informative and friendly answer.
Even the solution is not exactly what I was looking for, because I hoped to see all my notes from Politics listed in the right window, by simply click on the DT folder politics.
But I must admit, that your solution seems the only workable and is not that far from that I was looking for. So, thanks again.
Sad, that there is no opportunity to simply edit the path of .rtf’s created in DT.
Karajan
You will see them all. Here is the example folder group that I created to illustrate this, viewed in the Three Pane view.
Or did you mean that you want to see the documents from multiple groups in the same view? You can mix the files in a group so that some are indexed and some are contained in the database. If that’w what you want to see, then index the folder from the Finder and create new documents in the database to the same group. The will not be exported out to the Finder, unless you want them exported using the method I described above.
The path of the documents contained is managed by the database, and it is also dynamic as documents are edited, converted from one format to another, etc. If you could explain more why you want to edit the paths directly, perhaps when can help with that. I do not fully understand from your first post why you want to edit this directly.
Well, yes, but not if I click on the main folder “politics”. For me it is useful seeing my thoughts by clicking on the main group an not to have to open the sub folders to go to my “notes” folder.
My idea was, to move the text files in the DT database /….dtBase2/Files.noindex/rtf/b/test.rtf to another directory, but now I realized, due to programming structures, I cannot do so (as you mentioned it: dynamic).
So I will work with “move to external folder” as before.
You can do a couple of things here to get what you want. You can expand the top level group and shift- or command-click to select all the sub folders, which will then show all the documents from both groups in the view pane.
You can even then select all the documents in the view pane and replicate them to a new group, if it helps to show everything in one group.
If you do this, note that newly added documents to the source group(s) will not be automatically replicated to the new, combined, group.
So sorry-I am going off topic here, but I notice in these screenshots that some folders are yellow, and others are blue. All I have are yellow folders; how do I have some show up as blue? I could use one color for books and the other for notes.
Blue folders indicate that tagging is turned off for that group, which is the default for indexed folders. To get a blue icon you could bring up the info pane for a group and a) turn off tagging for that group, or if you need tagging enabled, then b) change the icon by pasting in the icon of another group that has tagging turned off. The icons will not match exactly, but they are close.
