"Highlights" app - export annotations to DEVONthink, etc.

Apologies for the silence following your kind sharing.
Just to let you know that it doesn’t work for me. The script runs, apparently, but the output contains only the following:

$fileName.lastPathComponent/>

Ah, I’m afraid I’m not able to help. I don’t have any programming or scripting experience, I just copied this template from another similar one and tweaked it by trial and error until it worked for me (which it still does!)

I did look at the documentation st the Skim site which purports to cover writing templates, but I found it impenetrable, and in particular whole areas don’t seem to be covered.

But in principle the Skim templates appear capable of formatting Notes exports into more or less any text-based format, provided you know what you’re doing!

Hi everyone,

I am the developer of Highlights. I was just made aware of this thread and wow! Lots of great feedback here:D I am not an avid DT user myself, but I am getting more and more into it as I am getting deeper and deeper into my PhD work. Needless to say, I hope to make the integration as seamless as possible.

Regarding instabilities, please send your crash reports/PDFs that crash the app/other feedback to contact(at)highlightsapp.net

Version 1.1 is currently in testing and introduces several new features, but should hopefully also improve stability.

-Jonas

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We wait with baited breath… Sounds like it could be a great compliment to DTP!

Many thanks for popping in!

Looking forward to it! 8)

Jonas just released a new update. Here is the list of improvements:

Looking good - but unfortunately, with not much in the line of a Manual/online assistance - cannot seem to find/use/activate (almost) any of the new features…

Will play around a bit more, and see if something switches on the light.

Yes, Cassady I am afraid documentation so far has been lacking and it’s definitely something I want to improve. However, I am happy to answer any questions you might have here.

Sticky notes and annotation colors are two new big features and both available from the toolbar. Hopefully, these should be intuitive. The same goes for scroll sync.

Most of the other new features can be found in Preferences:

  • In the “Colors”-tab you can name your colors to represent a category: e.g. Red = “Summary”, Yellow = “Methods” and have them sorted by their category.
  • In the “Customize”-tab you can set what sort of information you want to be displayed per annotation.
  • In “Customize”, you can also turn on Papers (reference manger) URL-scheme to direct all links to Papers instead of the browser. If the DOI of the PDF you are opening is present in your library it will open directly, otherwise Papers will fetch the website where you can download the journal article.

Appreciate the reply - will give the above a whirl!

For those of you who didn’t catch it, the latest version of Highlights just went up – and it’s looking even better than ever, esp. for DTP users seeking annotations solutions. The developer has been very responsive to our requests, and tailored the updates accordingly. This application has been incredibly helpful. Can’t wait to see more, future additions! Seems like it’s an app that gets better with time…

The latest version in the U.S. store as of today (v1.2, published 2014-01-03) has some issues with inadvertently overwriten annotations. Jonas is working on an update.

That will be fixed. I agree with @jprint714’s basic assessment – Highlights is excellent. The combined annotations & narrative/commentatary that is easily constructed with Highlights is a great idea. IMO it is good for the community of acadmics, researchers, writers and others who use DEVONthink to buy the products to support innovative small developers like Jonas Ribe, an academic who had an itch to have better tools for his work and wrote Highlights.

I hope DEVONtech is paying attention to Jonas’ work (and talking to him), because there’s a synergy between DEVONthink and Highlights that both developers should be cultivating.

Looking good! :slight_smile:

The ability to sort the annotations by colour is a very clever idea, imo.

Given that I use different colours for different ‘types’ of highlighting/annotating (Red = Vital point; Purple = To Quote etc. etc.), it allows me to pull up a summary, with the annotations grouped by category - and thereby to quickly look for a particular type of annotation… I.e. - all the “vital” points right at the top, followed by points/annotations that are Quotable etc. etc.

YMMV, but the above is potentially very useful, and AFAIK, one of the few/only(?) annotation software products that I have seen that allows for this!?

One request – please allow the user to also select the colour - that would be a very welcome addition. Were it to be allowed, a user could then annotate on the mac, on the iPad/iOS, and inside DTPO itself, and ensure consistency in annotation structure/context.

Jonas is here some times, but he’s always over there. He listens to tweets.

Thanks korm.

Fired off the request – will pop something up if I get a reply!

I agree with everyone – and I’m also hoping there will be more Highlighter - DTP integration. That would be ideal. I’ve also contacted the developer with a few suggests (e.g., perhaps including two annotation views: one that follows the page order, and one that’s organized by the color schema). If possible, it would be nice if clicking the page links would open the PDF in DTP, though I understand this might be a tall order (technically speaking).
So far, I’ve integrated Highlights into the following DTP workflow:

-I save my PDF docs to DropBox folders, and read & mark them up on my iPad (so far, GoodReader is my app of choice, but I’m shopping around for a better app);

-I transfer the marked up PDF docs to my DTP folders, open them in Highlights, and then export the Highlights annotated file to my DTP folders (I suspect there’s a more efficient way of doing this);

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to copy select annotation from a Hightlights-produced document (as well as original PDF documents), and paste them into a single document (e.g., a memos for a particular topic/set of issues). Ideally, I’d love the ability to include Text links (ideally) or Page links, that would highlight text selections or pages, respectively (either from the annotated or original document or annotated document).

I like the way that the “Make annotation files for each citation plus notes+tags” and “QuoteHighlight&Annotate” scripts work – though I wish the latter had the ability to copy & paste multiple quotations from disparate documents and had the Text link feature from the “… citation plus notes+tags” script. That would be ideal…

Incredible.

Can any Highlights user tell if the app sorts annotations on double-column PDFs correctly?

It’s one of my biggest frustrations when using Skim in that highlights sort by position on page i.e. from top to bottom, rather than following the text flow down the two columns.

Just tested on a two-page double-column PDF. It runs the annotations top-to-bottom, left column then right column, starting over on the left with each new page. Seems to be the correct order.

Thanks! That’s exactly what I’d expect/hope, but sadly Skim doesn’t do this. Looks like I’m going to be changing my PDF reader …

I actually brought this up in internal conversations. I’m liking what I’m seeing so far.

And welcome, Jonas! :smiley: