Feature Request: Improved Merge

Hi Jim,

I am not sure if this is the thread you gave me the link to, but this is actually what I was looking for. So thanks in any case!

One question: Is it possible to modify the merge + delete function so that the file is automatically named after the first file that was selected? Roger’s old script used to do this and it was much smoother.

Thanks!

I am curious Jim as to why you decided to make this available only as a ‘run only’ script. Does it use a private api for DT which the DT dictionary doesnt expose yet :wink: ? (Hinted at here)

… heads off on a hunt for an applescript decompiler :smiling_imp:

Frederiko

@Frederiko: Nope. All public APIs. It’s likely just force of habit. I have scripted professionally for almost 20 years, mostly in large corporate situations. Issuing RO versions was just part of the routine so I didn’t have people rooting around and breaking things (which would lead me to have to fix things I shouldn’t).

Old habits… :smiley:

Fair enough Jim, but I hope its not something people decide to do regularly. It rather misses the point of the forum. Its rather like the difference between giving a person a fish and a fishing rod. I certainly would never have learnt applescript and found DT as useful as I do without the generous scripts from korm and many others to study.

Frederiko

I have been using this script as a central part of my workflow since it was available but, after a gap when I have not used it for a while, I have found it behaving strangely. I have used it to merge two or more PDF files and instead of creating a new PDF file, it created an RTFD file containing the PDFs, sort of as attachments. This is useless for me as I need PDFs to put in my bibliographic database.

I created some dummy PDFs using my word processor to play around with, and those merged to PDFs as they should, but when I merge other PDFs, created from JPGs using DT’s “Convert to searchable PDF” command, I get RTFD. I am at a loss about what is happening.

Sorry to reopen this old thread, but I came back to it to download the script again, in case something had happened to it when I moved to a different computer (I am now using a Macbook instead of an iMac, but I don’t see why that should make any difference). I haven’t tried the same operation on the old machine.

Problem partially solved. I since worked out/guessed that it is treating what are labelled as PDF’s as if they were JPG files. Though they are labelled as PDF, no PDF sidebar appears when I select one of them. I solved the problem by re-importing the JPGs and re-converting them to searchable PDFs. A bit time-consuming, especially for the computer but it seems to work, and the new ones are labelled PDF+text. Could my database somehow have got corrupted and JPGs mislabelled as PDF?

We are unable to reliably reproduce the issue where Convert to Searchable PDF yields a PDF instead of PDF+Text, but should be able to drag the PDF out of the database, delete the copy in the database, then reimport it. From all reports I’ve seen, this reimports as PDF+Text.

Thank you for this, which I would not have thought of. The process adds a few characters to most of the filenames but that does not matter. Its a lot quicker than re-creating the PDFs from the JPGs.

No problem.

Good evening.

Is there any chance, that metadata like URL could be merged too? Maybe like this:

Text A

Metadata A

Test B

Metadata B

This feature could be useful if you read and extract text from webarchive to new markdown text snippets. If metadata is merged too it is possible to see the Text and die URL together from all marked snippets. This is a nice view to create a text from these snippets with a possible footnote to the URL as a source.

A view of some text-snippets in one window could be an alternative, but I could not find that feature. As a writer, this could be very helpful because often you have to work through sources and extract text and information from them.

Nevertheless is DEVONthink a great Application with a massive functionality.

Hi Could you please share the latest version of this script again?

/anders

The Merge and Delete script? This is already possible by holding rhe Option key and choosing Tools > Merge & Delete…