DEVONthink was introduced in 2002, beginning with the 1.x version that was over time extended to DEVONthink Personal 1.x, DEVONthink Pro 1.x and DEVONthink Pro Office 1.x editions. There were many maintenance updates and feature evolutions in the 1.x series.
Version 2.x introduced significant changes to the database structure and features, and likewise has had numerous maintenance updates and feature enhancements.
Just as there have been two generations so far, 1.x and 2.x, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Christian and Eric have a vision and plans for a subsequent generation of DEVONthink. Although I haven’t discussed this specifically with Christian, I would expect that enhancements such as the addition of masks or fields to documents (but without changing their native filetypes) would fall into the “next generation” category. No, we don’t discuss release dates.
But even in version 1.x, it was possible to emulate, at least partially, much of the power of fields or masks in plain or rich text documents – especially in version 2.x, which permits searches for multiple phrase strings. (DEVONthink Sheets offer other possibilities, but I’ll focus on the moment on ordinary text documents.)
One can think of the text content of a plain or rich text document as a single “field”, whose size can range from null to many thousands of searchable words, and with associated metadata in DEVONthink such as Name, Size, Kind, Tag(s), Spotlignt Comments, etc.
Is it possible to use a text document as a vehicle for emulating a flat database that contains multiple fields? (I won’t get into issues of manipulating numerical values.)
Example: Suppose I wish to develop a catalog of a collection of beetles, and wish to include searchable information about a number of characteristics that differentiate the members of the collection. In a database such as FileMaker Pro I would create a number of fields, depending on the granularity of the characteristics I wish to include. Some fields would be text strings, such as Species Name, Habitat, Color, Sex, etc. Others might or might not be numerical values, such as measurable characteristics including weight, length, width, etc.
From such a FileMaker Pro database I could print a report about the members of the collection that meet my search criteria.
Or I could create a template text document in DEVONthink that contains headers or cue strings for each characteristic of members of the beetle collection. The template would on separate lines include “fields” such as Species Name, Habitat, Color, Sex, etc. and for each individual in the collection of beetles that information would be added, e.g., for the Color “field” the entry for an individual might be Color Blue.
In DEVONthink I can search my filled-out collection of documents (resulting from use of the “beetles template”) for blue beetles by doing a Content search for “Color Blue” (a phrase search including the quotation marks), and it would pull the same results for that criterion as would the FileMaker Pro database when searched for “Blue” (without quotation marks) as the color in the Color field. And if I’ve used the same descriptors in my FileMaker database and my text file “database” for Habitat, I could add the search criterion for Habitat in both cases, to find blue beetles that live in the specified habitat.
Granted, this kludge to emulate masks or fields in text files isn’t as powerful or flexible as a FileMaker Pro database (or the future DEVONthink), but just might be a useful trick in the user’s collection of tools. I’ve been using it for years.
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