I’ve just studied the manual, and don’t think I understand indexing. Anyone want to take a stab at explaining it a little more detailed then what’s in the manual? Also, I was surprised at what appears to be an inability to display the results of a search inside of a pdf document. i.e. when i search for “index” on the file "DEVONthink Manual "in acrobat, i am given a hit list off to the side of all instances, and the text itself inside the document is shaded where all instances of the searched term is found. when i try the same thing inside of DEVONthink itself, also on the manual, i am only shown what document in my database contains the term, but it doesn’t highlight the term itself and show me where it is. is this a limitation of the quartz engine or DEVONthink?
This is a limitation of Quartz/Cocoa (and Apple’s Preview on the other hand uses a private solution).
However, indexing basically stores a list of words for each content inside the database but not the content. Therefore the indexed files are still necessary for displaying and can’t be edited (contrary to imported files). Another difference is that the Phrase/Wildcards search options do usually not work as only a word list is stored (using the Phrase option to search for a substring does of course still work).
But avdantages of indexing are that it’s faster than importing and that indexing creates smaller databases and therefore it’s recommended for static material (e.g. documentations, help files, reference material etc.)