Exporting Tinderbox notes to DEVONthink

Over at the Tinderbox forum, an interesting concept developed by Sumner Gerard:

Exporting to DEVONthink using AppleScript

In this case, the export is from Tinderbox to a new record in DEVONthink.

After the hoopla in the DThink blog about how v2.8.8 of DTPO has better integration with Tinderbox, I got stuck in to explore this. From the comments posted, it seemed like it should be easy. Simply copy Tinderbox notes and paste them into DTPO.

Except that standard copy/paste does not work. I have seen a few questions along these lines - how do you get it to work? Well maybe the concept of pasting from clipboard as a new Data item is familiar enough to most DTPO users that it did not need to be explained. But I was not aware of this. If you simply try to paste from the clipboard with Cmd-V, nothing happens.

Apparently, in DTPO, you must use Cmd-N or Data | New | Paste from clipboard.

Trackback links are pasted as well, which is nice. Have not yet tested whether attributes/tags are pasted as well.

Tags are pasted as long as you have used the Tinderbox “Tags” set attribute from the Reference category. No other attributes are carried over. (How could they be – you could potentially have hundreds of attributes in a Tinderbox document – to what would they be mapped in DEVONthink?)

The link back is accurate as long as the document you linked from is known to Tinderbox by name in the Tinderbox recent files list. If you clear Tinderbox’s recent files list the link back is broken and cannot be restored. That Tinderbox works that way has nothing to do with DEVONthink.