I have a number of documents in my database that contain the acronym “ARC.” All I want to do is find all the documents that contain an occurrence of this acronym, and subsequently navigate the sequence of matching locations via CMD-G or an equivalent mouse action, such as clicking on a forward-pointing arrow button. This is an extremely common, if not the most common, use-case called whole word search within an equally common problem domain known as “full-text search.” How do I do this in DEVONthink?
You could open a search window (Tools > Search), enter the word and use Go > Previous/Next Highlight to switch between the occurrences.
I cannot just “enter the word” because DT Pro 3.1.1 does a substring search by default, not a word search. If I enter “ARC”, for instance it will count “architecture” as a matching occurrence. The obvious workaround would be to specify a case-sensitive search (of course, this would only work with acronyms), but the designers of DT, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to support case sensitive searches. I have also tried numerous expressions such as “ARC” and ^ARC$ (which return the same results as “arc” without the quotes.) and nothing works. Secondly, I cannot “use Go >Previous/Next Highlight” in the absence of a successful search.
In fact, without case-sensitivity, it is impossible to distinguish words from acronyms (unless the acronyms are punctuated, and they seldom are). “ARC” is an example, because it is both an English word and an acronym. In the Apple Developer Documentation, “ARC” stands for “Automatic Reference Counting.” Now consider the fact that the string “arc” is going to occur quite frequently in the ADD, sometimes as a mathematical term, sometimes as a substring of words like “architecture,” and sometimes as an acronym. DT is simply incapable of distinguishing these usages, which detracts significantly from its usefulness as a document management tool in this day and age of “alphabet soup.” Consider as well the fact that when people make up acronyms they very often work at getting the acronym to be a word.
I Win!