I’m a new user of DevonThink Pro and am having some difficulties. I want to be able to capture and import small text clusters from PDFs of journals that I download but can’t seem to do it. I can capture an image of the paragraph but then it isn’t searchable by DTP. I’ve also tried to use the Services menu for this but it’s grayed out. Is there any way I can avoid importing the whole PDF into my database? I want very precise sections so I can remove as much noise as possible.
Right now I can’t make the PDFs into rich text or plain text. Can anyone walk me through this?
Hi, Jim. Personally, I download the whole article from scientific journals. But if I’ve got the choice, as is common, I select the desired rich text and images from the HTML page of the article, and capture my selection as a rich text note. (I dislike the PDF version, as it’s multi-column, making text selection more difficult; also, text captured from a PDF has fixed line endings that must be removed if an excerpt is used in another document.)
You can capture text from a multi-column PDF in your database this way: Hold down the Option key while ‘drawing’ a block of text to be selected. Then press Command-C and the block is in the clipboard.
To convert an entire PDF into a text version, select the name of the PDF in a view window. Now press Data > Convert > (your choice of plain or rich text). A new text-only document with the same name will be created.