Hello!
I’m a new DEVONthink user still in my free month. I’m planning to move entirely from Evernote to DEVONthink PRO and I’d greatly appreciate if you could give me some hints as to how to deal with following hurdles. I’d like to add that I’ve read the other posts on the subject (as many as I could find), but I didn’t really find any concrete solutions to my problems. I have thousands of notes so obviously I want to automate the work as much as possible.
1. I managed to import all my notes to DEVONthink databases and I’m pretty happy with the arrangement. However there are two major problems I’d like to resolve:
a) Some, not all, Evernote notes have landed in their own separate groups. In case of PDFs I used to store in Evernote, these often contain a formatted note with nothing but a link to the PDF and then the PDF itself. In some cases however I kept the comments in the note that had the PDF attached… and in some cases there were multiple PDFs in a single group… so now some groups contain multiple PDFs and a formatted note with the comment and the links.
→ I’d like to scan all these groups, move PDFs out of them to the parent group, delete the notes that have nothing but a link in them, but move the comments, if they exist, to the DEVONthink’s Annotation field of the respective PDF files… I can write some very basic Apple Scripts, but this is way beyond me. Is there a way to use built-in functions to achieve that? Maybe some smart search and then move the PDFs manually, and discard the groups later?
b) Some Evernote notes contained images and these are now stored as “formatted notes” in DEVONthink. It’s OK on the Desktop, but Devonthink to Go is not showing these images properly - they show up so small they are almost illegible. Surprisingly I cannot zoom them in with gestures or blow up the image to full screen preview with a tap or a double tap. This is a serious oversight in the mobile app design, but for now I have to deal with it somehow.
I’ve tried converting such a note to PDF, RTF and HTML. PDFs were showing OK on the mobile app, but ability to edit these notes becomes limited. Rich text is fine, except that now the images are now too big - they stick out and I cannot scroll horizontally to see the remaining part of the image. HTML notes show the same way as RTF, but these do allow for horizontal scrolling. I’d probably prefer RTF as a more portable format, but HTML is palatable as well.
→ Is there a fix for DTtG behavior in sight? Perhaps I should wait for the fix and don’t touch these notes right now? I’ve found some old discussions on the subject, but those are almost one year old…
If not, is there a way to scan for formatted notes containing images and batch-convert these only to RTF or HTML?
2. This may be a small issue, but for some reason I cannot find any instruction on how to do it. How do I mark notes with reminders attached as “done”? I get the alert as I set it, but afterwards these notes stay in the reminders list and there seems to be no way to dismiss them, other than going into settings and removing the alert. This is not ideal, because I lose the information when the task related to the note should’ve been done and when it was actually completed…
→ Am I missing something? Or do I need to type these informations in the notes’ Annotations field myself? Are there any publicly available scripts for managing reminders in such a way?
3. The AI scanning for my notes and producing suggestions as to how to group them and what other notes are related sound very intriguing… but is it multilingual? Due to nature of my work my notes may contain up to 3-4 languages and then there are web pages and such in languages I do not speak myself. Will AI suggestions apply to all this?
4. If I understand correctly, DEVONthink does allow for geotagged notes, but I couldn’t find any option to geotag notes created in DTtG. Is it possible? If not, what note-taking app are you using on iOS to create geotagged notes to export to DEVONthink?
5. I’ve enabled the OS X sharing extension to add documents and notes from other applications to DEVONthink directly. All the notes I add from Apple’s own Notes.app are being stored as RTF, but the images and handwriting in these notes ends up treated as attachment at the bottom of the note, rather than inline as in the original note.
→ Is it possible to change the format in which notes are being imported? Will it fix the problem?
Those are rather specific issues, but I have a lot of data I’d have to mold to fit into DEVONthink and I’d greatly appreciate any help I can get.
Thanks in advance!