Hi all,
I am wondering if there is a way to export my .rtf file where I have pasted page/document links, and create an external document (or html) that includes the linked pages/pdfs. Does that make sense? So i have a bunch of notes from my database with files or pages linked, i want to export the notes to share the notes, links, and linked docs with another person. Any suggestions as to how?thanks.
c
The basic problem is that there is no standard way to make a hyperlink from a separate pdf to an individual pdf page inside a pdf outside of devonthink.
You could convert your rtf of your notes to a pdf, merge the notes with the referenced documents and then manually go through each reference highlighting it and linking it to the appropriate pages. This will work if you only ever intend to do it once. It rapidly becomes labourous and error prone and is very very hard to automate. It also does not translate well if the documents are printed out. I have tried this approach and do not recommend it.
The better way is to paginate the bundle of pdf documents and reference the page in your notes. That way anyone who wants to see the source of your reference can hit Cmd-F in Acrobat (or whatever their pdf reader is) and type the page number to go to the precise page. This works because the system scales easily, is understandable and the person on the other side needs nothing extra. It also translates well to paper. Lawyers use a system called bates numbering, named for the 19th century inventor of it, Edwin Bates.
The third way is to buy your team Macs and Devonthink for each Mac and synchronise using the dropbox interface. This actually is not a joke and for large projects can be more cost effective than the time lost in trying to get everyone on the same page. I have 2 mac minis loaded with DT and synced to the relevant databases which I loan out to people I work with.
The ideal solution would be to use Devonthink’s webserver and interface but unfortunately references only go to the pdf itself and not to the specific page.
I have sent you a private message with some alpha scripts which may assist.
Frederiko
Hello korm,
The specific difficulty I pointed to was in relation to the the way links to pdfs are handled in the web interface
An internal Devonthink link like this:
x-devonthink-item://EDA94BF8-C666-4FD3-BF43-A491001FEB0F?page=100
will be converted to this in the web interface
http://192.168.1.117:51284/thedocumentname.pdf?id=EDA94BF8-C666-4FD3-BF43-A491001FEB0F
thus losing the reference to the page number.
This is a pity because acrobat does have a way to reference a specific page over a url using a syntax of this form:
http://192.168.1.117:51284/thedocumetname.pdf#page=24
See http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/PDFOpenParameters.pdf
Devonthink doesn’t adopt this syntax in the current conversion of internal links to web links although it could easily do so. It would certainly make the web interface more useful.
Unfortunately there is no applescript access from to or from the server component so I haven’t been able to figure out a workaround.