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.