Hi…
If you want to search for any PDF with annotations, then you can use the predicate and value combination PDF annotations > 0 and this seems to work fine.
However, there doesn’t seem to be an analogous predicate for RTF files with annotation highlights.
The Annotation panel (Ctl-6) for both PDF and RTF annotations shows the highlight annotations without problem, so DT3 clearly knows how to retrieve the highlights, but the capability doesn’t seem to be exposed to the search / smart interfaces.
Is there a way of doing this which I’ve missed, or am I misunderstanding something?
(BTW, I know that RTF > PDF conversion doesn’t create new annotations, which is presumably down to the third party PDF framework. Here I’m simply talking about DT3’s existing RTF annotation highlights being available to the wider search features.)
Many thanks…
Only PDF annotations are indexed currently but attributes of rich text aren’t.
Cheers, Christian.
They’re being picked up by the Annotations Inspector though, so presumably the plumbing is already in place for it to be added at some point?
Maybe in a future release.
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Hi Christian,
I wondered if this additional feature was still on the cards. Obviously, given how much effort you’ve put into making Markdown a first class citizen with highlights being registered in the Annotations panel, it would be good if both RTF and Markdown files could get the equivalent of the md_annotationcount predicate…
Many thanks,
David
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RTF doesn’t explicitly mark annotations (contrary to PDF or Markdown), it’s just styling. A future release might change this depending on interest.
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Thanks, Cristian.
For me personally, the facility to cater for markdown is more important than the RTF, but others of course will have different views.
Please forgive my technical naivety, but aren’t you already doing this behind the scenes? The Annotations Panel (`Ctl-6) for both RTF and markdown files is being filled from somewhere, so on the face of it, you’ve already solved the technical problem.
All I’m suggesting is exposing that already collected information to the user for use in searches and smart groups etc.
To be clear, I do understand that you have too little time and too many feature requests, but I think is is a logical extension to current features which will be very welcome in due course.
Many thanks!
If I understood @cgrunenberg correctly, “annotations” in RTF do not really exist. I.e., there’s no “logical” annotation in RTF, it’s only a certain style applied to some text. You would not be able to discern if that’s meant to be an annotation or simply coincides with an annotation style after the fact.
Much as you can’t really figure out if something is a heading in RTF. The format is fairly limited and I guess nobody cares much about it nowadays anymore.
Actually we still have more people using RTF than Markdown. Easily. 
Yet if you look in the Annotations Panel you will see that highlights in RTFs and Markdown docs are being picked up, so DEVONthink is doing something to recognise them and to report the colour.
A search md_(rtf/markdown)annotation:>0 would be useful, I think, and as far as I can see (which isn’t very far) the information is already available. In due course!
But of course, if there are technical difficulties, I totally respect Cristian’s judgement on this!
Let me just add a little detail to the use case:
Years ago I use to annotate RTFs by highlighting them, without necessarily taking formal notes. I’m revisiting that area and I’d like to go through the RTF files and annotate them properly, but there are hundreds of them and opening each one individually to check the ctl-6 panel would be tedious.
The ability to teach on the presence or otherwise of highlights would be useful.
Thanks.