Is there an easy way to make non-standard markdown extensions (.highland) searchable?

DEVONthink
1

I’ve only recently started to consolidate to the .md extension for everything. I have years’ worth of notes I’ve written in Highland 2, which uses markdown but defaults to a proprietary .highland extension (seems to be a zip-file/container that contains a text file alongside other things). To my dismay I have found that DevonThink does not search the text inside of these documents.

I haven’t been able to find any information on whether there is for example a plug-in that could make the contents of these files searchable. So, before I change the extensions on every file and re-import them—which does work but with so many files feels easy to make a mess of things—thought I would ask if there is a preference or something that I’m missing. Quick preview (space bar) of the files does work (though not 100% reliably, not sure why—restarting usually fixes) so the text is accessible in some form, but nothing from the text inside the files comes up when I do a regular search.

Thank you for any help.

2

Welcome @Humaan

Read the Appendix > Hidden Preferences section of the built-in Help and manual. There are instructions on how you can add additional plain text extensions. Note this change will not retroactively apply, so you’ll need to either reimport the files or do a File > Rebuild Database on the database in question.

3

That’s great, good to know! Unfortunately it seems to be the case that there’s too much going on with the .highland format for it to pass as a plain text document (it’s a textbundle containing json files and a .md file), I tested it and even after re-importing the files they remain unsearchable. As a counter-test I renamed just the internal text file to a made-up extension and repeated the steps to register it in terminal, and search for the contents of this file worked fine even when the file itself was not openable. So, I will just do a one-time rename of my files and then reimport, won’t be too bad.

Thank you very much!

4

Ahh, indeed. I was out of the office when I responded so I didn’t check on the format. But you’re welcome either way :slight_smile:

5

I wonder whether it’s a zipped text bundle, does importing work after changing the extension to .textpack?

6

Seems like it

.highland is custom file format we developed to support the large feature set of Highland 2.

Based on the TextBundle file format, .highland was developed with the goals of maximizing compatibility while being flexible enough for us to add more features down the road.

.highland files are compressed using Zip to enable better drag-and-drop support and reduce file sizes.

…

.highland files are compressed versions of a customized .textbundle file.

(From: Highland Document Format)

1 Like
7

Thanks, the next release will be able to index & display such files.

1 Like
8

Great, thank you all!