Preview PDF to Devonthink

I have a problem. Some academic sites take me to a page for pdf which opens up directly in preview, there is not link given to save it beforehand. Now the pdf is open in preview how do I put it in devonthink and for these files I cannot even use the ‘save as’ option in preview.

Please anyone how do I put the PDF into devonthink from Preview?

Are you certain that the PDF is being viewed in Preview? The “Save As” option should be available if it’s open in Preview.

If the PDF is being viewed in DT Pro’s built-in browser, there’s no “Save As” option. But you can capture the PDf to your database.

  • Click in the URL address field to open the PDF in your default browser, which will let you save it, so that you can capture it. OR

  • Select DT Pro’s Scripts > Import > Save PDF to DT Pro from URL.

Note: The above script imports the PDF into the “body” of the database rather than to the Files folder inside the database package file. That will require somewhat more memory to load the database than would be required if the PDF had been saved into the Files folder. When DT Pro 2.0 is released, the script will then save new PDFs into the database Files folder. Of course, when you first open a database under version 2.0 all existing files will be transferred into the database Files folder structure at that time.

Thanks that helped when I opened the url from devothink.

But I also found out that if the pdf is opened in the preview program I can drag the small pdf icon near the green expand button of the preview into devonthink directly also. No need to save the pdf first and then draggin the file into the database.

Can I ask one more question. How can I set up one folder to be in sync (indexed) with devonthink using scripts. I started using Sente and imported my hundreds of references from endnote. Now using DOI locator this program is able to autmatically search, download and attach pdf’s of the research articles to references (I am having 90% success for articles published in 2000s). All those pdf’s are going in a directory of sente automatically renamed. As that directory is expanding constantly, any idea what is best course of action I should take?

  1. Import pdfs regularly for the next few days manually.

or

  1. I foresee that my pdfs will go into several hundreds if not thousands do I just use scripts to automatically index/import that folder at time periods. Now I have absolutely no idea how this could be done. If someone can help me here I would greatly appreciate it.
    Would indexing be better or should I import?
    And if yes does automatic indexing continuously watch the folder or indexes it after some time?
    How will it differentiate between old and newly added files?
    If I move the files within DT will it affect the original files in Sente document directory? I need to do that to put the files in proper order and folders.

This question has become too long but will appreciate a succinct answer.

Here’s one approach to think about and try.

DT Pro provides (on the download disk image) a folder called Extras, which contains among other items two Folder Action scripts, one that will invoke Import of new PDFs added to the folder, and one that would invoke Index capture of new PDFs into the database. (I would Import them, but that’s up to you. Indexing would work too, but the database will be less portable.) Note that you can periodically empty the contents of the folder if you have chosen the Import script. But never delete the contents if you have chosen the Index script.

Read about Folder Actions scripts in both DT Pro’s Help > DEVONthink Pro Help and in (from the Finder) Help > Mac Help.

Using that approach you are free to move the PDFs around anywhere within your organizational structure.

I would advise having the correct DT Pro database open, of course, when PDFs are being dumped into that designated Finder folder which has your Folder Actions script attached to it.

Thanks a lot. It worked.