Improve Search result of Chinese document

DEVONthink Pro is my main software for managing documents and searching is the main way I used to find the needed document. When searching for documents with Chinese characters, search results are poor.

I did some researches over the searching:

  • Searching directly in the “Search” windows of DEVONthink Pro give the poorest result, only a few documents are found.
  • Searching in the DEVONsphere Express gives a better but still missing some documents.
  • Searching in the DEVONthink To Go is much better and give the best results of above.

There is some third-party searching plugin (like github.com/mpco/AlfredWorkflow- … ink-Search), which try to improve the Chinese character search result. These plugins do their job but I can’t use it for my every searching.

I hope the DEVONthink Pro can have better searching, at least same with DEVONthink To Go.

As current workaround, in DTPO you can use fuzzy search by adding a tilde or using earmuffs, for example “~你好”, or “你好” (omit the quotes). This should give as much results as you need.

And yes, DTPO lacks the ability to handle asian languages properly for a very long time, and this problem will remain it is in a predictable future. The problem is in asian languages like Chinese, words cannot be separated by spaces, so it’s always a hard job to process multilingual documents.

For that DTPO is still usable by taking the workaround above, we can stay tuned and hope it been implemented in the next major release. Those DEVONtechnologies guys still have much more to do, after all.

Good luck.