Names versus Titles; are Titles useful?

DEVONthink Tips
1

DevonThink documents have fields called “Name” and “Title.” However, I can’t figure out how to make use of Titles. As far as I infer, many messages on this list use the terms interchangeably, and when they say “document title” they usually mean “document name,” or more precisely, the file name.

Can anyone straighten me out? I’m coming from EagleFiler, where Title is an editable field, and is actually the most useful way to summarize what is inside a PDF. For example, the file name might be based on the file name on Scopus, but I assigned a title based on the article’s actual title.
But in DT, the “title” field seems useless. I cannot edit it; it is apparently pulled from the PDF document, and many PDF creators do not pay much attention to their title fields. Many titles start with "Microsoft Word…."because that is the default when Word documents are turned into PDFs — thanks, Microsoft! If this is correct, then I should ignore the “Title” field - it is probably not even worth screen real estate.

So back to my original question: Is there any utility in the “Title” field. Does anyone use it?
Thanks.

2

You’ve got the right analysis. You’ll find two cases where Title was used prior to v2.8.6 – one of which has been removed from 2.8.6 onward. Tools > Show Properties > Title is active in PDFs because it is a standard property for that kind of document. The “Title” property can be shown in a DEVONthink column – but only for PDFs (and certain types of images). The second case where you would have found Title (now deprecated) was in the contextual menu – when text is selected there is (from 2.8.6) an option to Set Name As [the selected text]. Formerly this was Set Title As [the selected text].

I think most people use Comment instead of title to add short notes about a document. Comment is editable for every document.