Arrgh, I just learned that unlike visiting this forum with Firefox, when I do this in DTP and I accidentally click off the page, there is no back button. All I have written to post is now gone. Sigh …
I am looking for ways to use DTP to research as I write my book. I want to track my own progress, makes notes, etc. I am wondering of this is possible without importing vs indexing? I just watched a tutorial on DTP which showed I could highlight text and put in margin notes or even add a colored text box to a document.
My DTP is all indexed files and apparently, I cannot do this. is this a built in limitation of using DTP as indexed and not as file importer? And, if true, is there anyway I can mark documents as I progress?
I was hoping that DTP had a system similar to DevonSphere. I like It that I can search for a topic in DS and show associated files, broken down into file types, email, pdf, etc.
DEVONthink PDF annotation tools work the same way with indexed files and imported files. No difference. If you are unable to annotate a document, are you sure it is a PDF? Are your PDF’s OCRd?
DEVONsphere Express is using DEVONthink technology – technology that in DEVONthink helps you do exactly this:
I wasn’t paying attention to the document type. Right now I have been taking in all my possible areas of information and testing, watching tutorials, retesting, etc. So you are saying, It does this in PDF documents, but not in text documents? If true, OK, I will test that also. But the real benefit that I am learning is, how to keep track of tasks in each of several projects I am working on - including one about living life, paying bills, etc. I am trying the tags feature and smart groups to stay focused on associated files with a given project. I am also putting in a new rich text page in DTPO proceeded by a dash so It sorts to the top. That sets out my progress notes. But, is there no way to actually put in the stickies or call-outs for EVERY document? I wasn’t sure but from what you are saying, Making notes to myself ON THAT DOCUMENT (Web archive, Word, Text, Image, PDF) as I work through a draft or an idea is not doable?
When Adobe designed the PDF file format, several annotation features were included, such as highlighting and text note boxes. DEVONthink allows such annotations, and they can be applied to PDFs whether Indexed or Imported.
But that approach is limited to PDFs, and has the problem that those text notes are not themselves searchable. As the text notes are plain text, they cannot include formatted text, clickable links, images, tables or lists.
My databases hold a variety of document filetypes in addition to PDFs, and I prefer using an approach to annotations that results in searchable notes and that can apply to any document regardless of filetype.
DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office provide the Annotation template (Data > New from Template > Annotation — there’s a keyboard shortcut). Select the document to be annotated, invoke that template and a new Annotation note is created, a rich text note that is linked both to and from the referenced document. As such notes can hold clickable links, the Page Link of a PDF can be included to reference the page location from which a quotation was excerpted. Clickable links to other documents can be included. Although there can be only one Annotation note per referenced document, the Annotation note can hold multiple comments, summaries and excerpts from that document and/or link to other notes. Sometimes I include multiple Cornell Notes tables within an Annotation note to distinguish note segments.