Personal Dictionary/Glossary in DTP?

DEVONthink Tips
1

Has anyone used DTP to make some kind of little personal dictionary/glossary thing?
I’ve got a lot of various terms and phrases relevant to my studies/research that I would like to organize into some kind of reference like that.

Has anyone tried anything similar? Any suggestions?
thanks

2

I use DT Pro’s Records/Sheets feature to maintain a glossary of sorts – a history timeline of events in my local area. Each event is entered as a Record and stored in a Sheet. It works pretty well for me. I have set up a Sheet with columns for date, description, source, comment. I can view the entries either as a list with columns or as individual records. You could do something similar for word definitions and usage.

You can search the sheet either by the find field in the DT window or via Tools/Search… The latter is useful because you can limit the search to Records in your Sheet.

I haven’t found a way to sort the Sheet via a column (new records are added to the end of the Sheet.) My workaround was to write an applescript that sorts the exported sheet (tab-delimited text file) via the Unix sort command. I then reimport the file into DT. I have other applescripts that allow me to grep data from an exported sheet for reporting or storing in separate files.

3

Ah, cool, thanks for the info! Hm, so kind of like an embedded spreadsheet of sorts. I like it. Except… no sorting??? That’s kind of a deal killer. Maybe that’s something that will be improved in 2.0? (when’s that expected to arrive anyway?)

In the meantime, maybe I’ll just Excel or something. Hmm.

4

Oops. I may have given you the wrong impression. You can sort the sheet records by clicking on the column headers, ascending and descending. No problems there. But the next time you reopen the sheet, it reverts to fifo order.

Sorry for the confusion.

5

I use sheets for the same: for making mini-dictionaries of disciplines I am working on, and terms of translation from one language to another.

The fact that – after closing – the sheets return to “factory settings” is a bit of a drag. Any hope of this being changed in an upcoming release?

Of course, we’re all hoping for better “sheets” in v2.0, especially linking to and from other DT entries… :slight_smile:

Thanks.