Yes, that’s fine because we’re migrating from Zotero to Bookends, then to Devonthink. Devonthink would, ideally, will become the ultimate platform, after we OCR and index, thousands of newspaper articles currently in Zotero. We are, essentially, using Bookends as a “middle-man”. I noticed Devonthink’s import script for Instapaper csv file, and wondered if there’s a way to do something similar for Zotero’s csv files. We need: date of publication , keywords, URL (to vendor database, e.g. ProQuest) and (Zotero’s) export ID.
I do this all the time using a Smart Rule that monitors a Bookends import folder I keep in the Inbox. On import it sends it to where I want it to go. I always send it to the same folder though and I don’t know how much one can specify various destinations via say ‘file name’ and so on.
I think, though I can’t quite remember for sure, at one time modified the ‘summary’ format from Bookends which is what DEVONthink 3 uses. I modified the summary format inside Bookends of course.
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So, on import, Devonthink reads the Bookends rtf file, and places it in a Devonthink folder based on the info in the summary? That would get me closer – because, like you, i have modified the Bookends summary to show the path to the folder with the PDF file.
I will read up on smart rules – because it’s the folder# that determines the intended destination. Thanks!
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Good, really smart rules on DEVONthink 3 are very powerful. I neglected them myself until recently to be honest. I think a lot of complicated scripting and so on can often be short cut with a smart rule which will get you to the same place with a bit of ingenuity.
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@BLUEFROG @tudoreynon
I have explored a little and wondering, of course, about regular expressions and smart rules. I want to do something like this:
my version:
but I am stuck throwing everything into a folder called \1. Any ideas?
Ugh – I see that I designated a “string” when I am using a “regular expression”. I can use Change Alias, and the smart rule allows me to use the group folder number as an alias. Was still hoping to use File to move it into the folder (%groupName%?) – but this is getting me a step closer!
You can file using a RegEx capture group, e.g.,…
This actually puts the matched document into a RegEx subgroup.
And you can Control-click > Insert Placeholder.
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An example CSV file would be useful.
Here’s a link to an example csv file – as a Google sheet.example csv
What we realized is that, we’d like the metadata to be attached to the PDF file. Currently our export (RIS files and folders) from Zotero separates the PDFs from the metadata record.
We can “match” PDFs with metadata records using Zotero’s folder ID (Column 1, Alias) which seems to be unique and consistent. However, we are still manually dragging the keywords from rtf into the tag field of the PDF.
The goal is, of course, to take advantage of Devonthink’s marvelous full-text search on PDFs combining with tag filtering. The PI has done extensive tagging in Zotero. We have thousands of items, mostly PDFs, many of which need OCRing. Therefore, importing the PDFs into Devonthink makes sense.
I am in a similar situation (working with thousands of PDFs between DTP and citation manager, trying to get them OCR’d).
I own Bookends and I owe a lot to Jon’s documentation and help. Still, I do not use it any more.
I use Zotero like you do, and I use the BetterBibTex Plugin to export and keep updated a BibLatex-File. Works like a charm. You can set up a name rule for your PDF that includes the BibTex key, and you can set up the Bibtex Key rules such that they will be a nice PDF name either. That way, you can import extensive citation info and Tags as well as PDFs named identically.
You can import the .bib file as such and get a handy representation in table form, or you can import as text and get the original format as bibtex.
To get the single citations files that accompany the PDF (or can be imported in the meta data), I would split the bibtex file in the terminal into single citations and then import into Devonthink as -bib file and rename with the bibtex ID.
Cheers
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Thank you Maria! I’ve installed BetterBibTex Plugin – and it is very nice indeed. Thank you for the tip. I can see how this is helpful, but I’m wondering how you copy the tags (or other meta-data) from the citations to the PDFs. Thanks!
I am wondering if I should try something like this – mentioned in another forum. Script to import files from CSV index? - #7 by BLUEFROG
Hi Zoe,
Glad you liked it.
I am not fit in scripting, so I cannot give a solution. But I would pick up the bibtext ID in the “@” field in the table created from the .bib file, or the file name hidden in deh “file” field until the first .pdf:file. This identifies the PDF, and then you may add the meta data from the field “keywords” and/or “groups” to the metadata of the PDF.
Another way is to link from the citation file (imported as text, wiki links set to automatic and names) to the PDF. Here is a screenshot from my test group (don’t mind the double mention of the file please):
With this solution you may even use the biblatex file as one without separation of each citation into a separate file for the time being. Extracting information from the .bib file which is made into a table or from the .txt file (created just by changing the file extension) and copying into the meta data of the pdf in the same data base should be possible with scripting. But here, someone else may chime in.
Best,
Maria
Yes, I would start with this example.
Thanks, Maria! I got the example import csv script to work beautifully, except for the tags. It seems as if tags are more complex in Devonthink. While I can get the keywords imported as custom meta-data, it may be that, in order to function as tags in Devonthink, they have to be included as a different type of metadata (e.g. generic or properties). Next I will try your second method – thank you for suggesting that!
What issue are you seeing with tags?
Thanks to Maria for pointing me in the right direction. I suspect the problem is my inexperience! I’m using a modification of the simple teaching edition script to import files and metadata from a csv file. (a modified BibTex file from Zotero) My modified script is pictured in this screenshot.
It works wonderfully! The keywords, however, imported as strings and don’t function as I would like them to–as tags do in the Generic meta-data field.
I suspect that importing the keywords as “strings” may be the problem; they are more like a list. I would like the keywords to function as tags, so that I can filter with them. Any ideas are most welcome!
Tags are indeed strings… in a list. 