Would someone please explain to me why the font size in the viewing window cannot be increased? I have a lot of old newspapers that I search. This is an example of the font size I’m confronted with:
The only solution I have come up with is to open the file in Preview or another pdf viewer, enter the keyword again (which doesn’t always yield the same results as when in DT) and, if I find the hit I’m looking for, enlarge it so I can read it. I’ve read numerous complaints about this phenomenon dating all the way back to 2005 but it seems as though nothing has ever been done to address the issue. Why?
And yes, I know that Ctrl - click with the cursor in the viewing window brings up the “Zoom In” and “Zoom Out” options. To make the size readable takes a minimum of 4 operations.
What is so extraordinarily difficult on the part of the DT developers to not include ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons like every single other pdf viewing program has?
What are these icons at the top of the viewing window good for? Clicking on them doesn’t do anything:
The Zoom In/Out (also their key equivalents) is what is on offer, as are Zoom+ and Zoom- buttons and all and works fine with PDFs for me here. How many “zoom” operations is required to satisfy you depends on the starting point of the image size and would probably be no different with any other PDF image viewer with a “+” button instead of a “Shift-Cmd+” key press. Or use the Zoom buttons on the main toolbar. See below.
Finally, you are free to use most any other PDF viewing/editing program that you prefer by using the “open with” feature of DEVONthink. Nothing really hooks you to only use what is inside DEVONthink.
The tools have different functions, the manual covers them all under Documents > PDF > Interface. Also read the section just before that explaining the view options. Maybe it makes sense for you to change the defaults.
Beyond zoom buttons in the window toolbar and keyboard shortcuts, you can also use the standard trackpad gestures to zoom (pinch in/out). And if you use a mouse, you can configure the scroll wheel to do the same when you press a modifier key. You do need third party software for that, it’s not an option in System Settings. I use LinearMouse and set CTRL+Scroll to Pinch Zoom.
The screenshot shows the default setting. If you don’t see the buttons the toolbar must have been customised at some point, hence it would be necessary to go back to “Customize Toolbar” in order to return it to the default.
When I open a pdf I see the same Zoom buttons that are shown in the next screenshot, posted by @rmschne.
This must apply to text pdf documents, of which the OCRed pdf newspaper cilpping is not one. Thanks for the explanation - I’m sure it will come in handy at some point in the future!
Be aware main windows and document windows have independent toolbars. For example a main window has the toolbar search field. A document window does not.
In this particular instance, I’m working with a 1.5Gb file of old newspapers, processed by a nationally-known company that is digitizing newspapers for many well-known museums. This file, in other words, has been OCRed. It is also a pdf. When I do a search in that file and find a hit, nothing I click on in the editing bar has any effect. My thought is that the editing bar only works with pdf documents that have been created with a word processing program. I could easily be wrong, though. It doesn’t really matter in this case, because I’m surely not going to make any changes to a digitized page of a 120-year-old newspaper!
