Improvements to Summarize Highlights

I suggest that “Summarize Highlights” adds a double line between individual quotes rather than the current single line. This would help i) better distinguish individual highlighted text passages and ii) avoid confusion between highlights with a “Details” comment and those without.

An example of what I mean is the following. Suppose I highlight a file as below.

There are four highlighted text elements. For the first two I’ve included a short description in the Details pane and for the last two text elements I’ve only highlighted.

I then use the “Summarize Highlights” function to generate a summary of all these elements. It looks like this:

Note that each highlight element (highlight or short description) is separated by one blank line and there is also only one blank line moving from one highlight to the next. Adding two black lines between all elements belong to one highlight and the next would improve differentiation and allow also the text file to be split into separate files for further analyses.

In addition if the highlight colour is lost say in converting to text I do not know anymore which was the highlight and which is my own short description. Adding two blank lines would help maintain this distinction.

Lastly, I would also suggest that the page reference is repeated for each highlighted passage rather than only after a change of page. This would help further analyses of the highlights in chunks or separate files.

I agree with all these suggestions!

A summary created by DEVONthink and an edited summary the way how you would prefer it for comparison would be great. Thanks.

Thanks for following up. A visual summary first of the desired improvements

NB: Either you allocate two empty lines between each highlight section or no empty lines between the highlight and description/comment user input while maintaining one empty line between highlight sections. One way or the other the boundary between different highlighted passages and their comments has to be identified.

Here a 2nd illustration of what an improved summary would look like based on the above diagram. To be it looks a lot tidier and the summary can be split into subfiles based on the empty line.

Any chance that you could send a copy of the PDF to cgrunenberg - at - devon-technologies.com? Then I could have a look at the actual PDF annotations & details. Thanks.

Yes - document is public literature. Coming your way now.