How can I "sync" Zotero saved searches with DTP smart folders?

DEVONthink Tips
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This should also apply to other programs such as Bookends.

For some of my research, it’s important to sort PDFs by date since chronology is important. That’s where DTP is lacking and reference managers are good. However, AFAIK, all reference managers have saved searches/smart folders that limit themselves to metadata–they do not search the contents of PDFs. I’d thus like to modify all PDFs in a given DTP smart folder so that the smart folder in my reference manager includes hits that only work because of content searches.

I tried to modify tags inside of DTP, but this doesn’t seem to work. Any suggestions?

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It’s unclear what you mean (at least to me).

  • Which date do you want to sort the PDFs by: creation, modification, publication, something else?
  • Why would DT not be able to sort by any of these dates if you tell it to?
  • All of these are metadata (in my mind), so what’s the problem with reference managers to save the searches for them?
  • What has the content of the PDF to do with the date you’re after?

I have no idea what you did, what you wanted to achieve, nor what “doesn’t work” mean. Some more detail might be useful here.

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I know that Zotero can search within pdf’s (as long as they are not saved as pure images, but have been scanned), and I think this is also true for EndNote

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In which regard?

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This is certainly not true of Bookends, which can use the Spotlight index to search the contents of pdfs. It is not a sophisticated search, but it does exist.

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Thank you for the responses.

I have no idea what you did, what you wanted to achieve, nor what “doesn’t work” mean. Some more detail might be useful here.

When I modified a tag in DTP, it did not update the tag in Zotero. My intent was to use this as a way of tagging all DTP smart folder results so that they show all show up within a saved search in Zotero.

I know that Zotero can search within pdf’s (as long as they are not saved as pure images, but have been scanned), and I think this is also true for EndNote

I redid a test with a PDF that has a keyword searchable inside the PDF but not in the metadata. Zotero saved search for [“Any field” “contains” “Keyword”] did not bring up the result. I then tried with “Attachment Content”, but, for some reason, when I use this parameter, it seems to bring up everything in my library.

This is certainly not true of Bookends,

For Bookends, I may be doing something wrong, but it’s certainly not as straightforwards as DTP. Yes, it can include spotlight results, but I can’t get it to include A, B, or C in Spotlight. It’s just one parameter that can’t be combined to non-Spotlight search parameters. This poses several problems for me since I like to use DTP’s smart folders to fish out a variety of keywords related to a research topic, including results in multiple languages (so I like to specify: French_Keyword_A OR English_Keyword_B OR French_Keyword_B OR …).

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There is no direct mechanism for this behavior, in either DEVONthink or Zotero.

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I just ran across this comment about Bookends Spotlight searches. You can combine Spotlight searches with any other search that Bookends does (e.g. searching for metatdata, PDF file tags, references in certain groups, etc.) using the Find window (Command-F) or a smart group. You can also perform boolean Spotlight searches like these

dog cat — finds pdfs containing the words dog and cat, not necessarily in that order

dog or cat — finds pdfs containing the words dog or cat

dog -cat — finds pdfs containing dog and not cat

“dog and cat” — finds pdfs containing the three word phrase “dog and cat”