Making my worksheet workflow DT compatible

Right now I’m using DevonThink to manage my paperwork, like recipes etc., create notes, collect all sorts of (potentially) usefull links, videos, websites, images and so on. I really like the powerful search function as well as the great sync function between Mac and iOS.

I am a teacher and create most of my worksheets and tests using Markdown files, which I then convert to PDF files via Pandoc using ConTeXt. Currently I work with a folder structure that looks something like this:
School → Subject → Curriculum Unit → Concrete Hour → Worksheet-01_Subject->Markdownfile/imgs folder/…

There are some images that I use more often, these are located for example under School → Images → Subfolders…

When I create a new worksheet I copy an existing folder (e.g. Worksheet-01_Subject) to the new location, rename it and the Markdown file, drop the associated images and then edit the Markdown file itself. I would now like to manage all my worksheets in Devonthink so that I can use the strong search function etc for them as well. One requirement would definitely be that I can drag the worksheet folders from Devonthink back into the Finder and everything still works (links to images, etc).

At first I thought of just creating the School folder as a database and dragging all subfolders into it accordingly, then groups will be created according to my folder structure. To make the links to the images work, I would create a subfolder imgs in each worksheet group and store all images that belong to it there. For images that are used several times, I would replicate?(not duplicate) an image e.g. from the School->Images group. This should ensure that all data is referenced via imgs/… and that I have usable Markdown files without devonthink:// urls when exporting.

So far so good. If I now want to create a new worksheet I would have to drag an existing one from Devonthink into the Finder, rename it there and drag it back again. Within Devonthink I haven’t found a proper way to copy groups and paste them with a different name. For the conversion to PDFs via Pandoc directly from Devonthink I have already found a script in the forum, via which I can probably do that.

Besides the Markdown-based worksheets, I rarely have other projects, e.g. in InDesign. Here I would probably either continue to work outside of Devonthink or whenever I need to edit the data pull the groups out of Devonthink, edit externally and then import again.

My question now would be, if someone has a tip, with which I can better adapt my workflow to Devonthink, e.g. in order to not always have to pull out, rename and re-import when creating a new worksheet.

Welcome! I don’t work like you so my solutions may be useless, but I have two comments:

  1. Is there a reason you don’t want to index the folders so they’re visible in DevonThink but you don’t have to drag to back and forth?
  2. Is there a reason you work in Markdown instead of e.g. Rich text, Word or Pages? Seems like the main problem you have is images. When I’m working with multiple images in a file, I switch to a text editor that can handle images. I don’t find it worth the headache of folders of images to use Markdown when lots of images are involved. If you did this, dragging the files back and forth wouldn’t affect the content of the files.
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