For a large research project, I’ve got a DT database with a lot of articles, documents, websites, even books.
Sometimes I come across a paragraph I want to save in a “Culls” folder. I can manually copy the selection, open the Culls folder and paste the text into a document there, adding the name of the document … I can create a Keyboard Maestro macro to automate that … but is there any easier way?
Similarly, I’d love to be able to apply a tag to just a portion of a document. If I’ve got a scanned book, say, adding a tag to the book doesn’t really help me find the relevant portion later. Is there some way - short of dividing the book into many many smaller documents - to tag just a section of a document?
DT allows you to create a “Page Link” to a specific page within a document. You can sae the page link as a bookmark. Then you can add a tag to that bookmark.
Alternatively, the Hook app lets you create a deep link to a specific paragraph or text passage inside a PDF if you use a supported PDF viewer such as PPDFPenPro. The Hook works even if the PDF file is stored inside DT. Once again you can store the Hook link as a bookmark and add a tag to that bookmark.
Thanks for the quick reply.
“Page Link” won’t do it for me, as I’m looking just to link a paragraph or two, and a lot of the documents aren’t broken down into separate pages. So Hook seems more promising.
I assume from your description that DT3 is not a supported PDF viewer for Hook. If that’s the case, how would I use one like PDFPenPro inside DT3? The PDF files are inside DT3, and I just want to make text selections and link them to a “Cull” folder or document, also inside DT3. Is there a way to make PDFPenPro the default PDF viewer inside DT3?
Thanks in advance.
In order for Hook to work with PDFPenPro deep linking, you need to set PDFPenPro to the default system PDF viewer.
Once that is done, if DT3 is asked to open a file externally, it defaults to the established system viewer for that extension.
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If you are on a Mac you can use PopClip to solve a big piece of the problem. PopClip has an Add To DEVONThink Extension. So you can select the text and in the PopClip pop up click on the DT icon. This will create a new note in the Inbox with the selected text. Now you just need to move it to your Culls group.
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Interesting. It doesn’t do exactly what I want, but it does seem to do quite a bit else, so I’m downloading it to test it out.
The closest I’ve come to what I want is a Keyboard Maestro macro which takes the selected text and pastes it into an OmniOutline outline, putting the source of the text in the OO Notes field for that item.
I was hoping to find someway to do this without leaving DT, but in the absence of that I may just allow myself to be contented with the DT3->OO workflow.
In any event, thanks for the PopClip tip. Looks very cool.
Yes, popclip is super cool. I’ve been using it for years – almost indispensible to me. Brett Terpstra created a tiny app called PopMaker that allows you to create your own extensions that can prefix and suffix the selected text. I have created a bunch of them to put different types of brackets around text () {} <>, markdown tags like selecting some text and having it put text around it, etc. There are also instructions on github to provide instructions for creating your own extensions.
@R_Barre Depending on what you want to do with the information and how you do your analysis, if you are going to add an external app then Tinderbox is a good choice. It is infinitely flexible for setting up custom metadata and custom rules for information analysis/reporting. I use that for curating/organizing links to academic literature for example.
there’s an omnioutliner script here that works for me - Cite&Write with OmniOutliner
Thank you for this - and thank you everyone for your replies.
I’ve tested Tinderbox and it doesn’t suit my workflow nearly as well as OmniOutliner. As for the OO script, it’s quite interesting, and inspired me to write a new Keyboard Maestro macro that more accurately does what I want: it copies the selected text, pastes it into the “Culls” outline, then focuses back on DT3 to get the citation (In my case, then name of the file), and pastes that into the OO notes field of the pasted text.
Works quite well, and I wouldn’t have gone in that direction had I not seen the OO “Cite&Write” script.
So, again, thanks much for the help.