Question on Linking the New Documents

DEVONthink Tips
1

hello dear community,

I have the following use case:

  • I read a PDF document (e.g., a book).
  • I might select text on a page, and ask chat to generate a summary as a new text document
  • OR: I might copy the entire pdf page and make a new document out of it

What is missing in this scenario for me, link to the original document and original location in the original document in the new doc.

For instance: I’ve asked a chat to generate a summary of the selected text on a page. It has achieved that well. But to be able to find the original document where this summary is taken, I have introduced a custom metadata field “Source Document”. I then go to the original document, copy (any page) and paste with the source link into that custom “Source Document” field.

The process is manual and, frankly, quite annoying. I also lose the position / page in the original document where the summary is coming from.

Ideally, I imagine the workflow something like that:

  1. I read a PDF. I want to either copy something or create a summary or extract just about any bit of information from a page.
  2. A new document is created and has a link / reference to the source document + the page where the contents of the new document are coming from.
  3. Ideally, I have these attributes both: in the new document itself and its metadata.

Am I missing something? Is my workflow missing some already existing features of DEVONthink which already allow this…?

many thanks in advance!

Anton

2

Did you try the Info > Annotations & Reminders inspector? Its popup menu includes e.g. commands to insert quotes, back links or chat summaries.

1 Like
3

how would you use it in my case?

I’ve explored it, but not sure how to use it my use case..

4

I’ve played around with the Annotations pane — thanks, I think I’m getting somewhere.

For example:

I select some text in a document. Use “summarize via chat command” — I then click on “Annotate” to save the annotation. This displays the summary of the selected text in the Annotations pane and also creates an annotation document.

Q: is there a way to quickly navigate from within the newly created annotation document to the original document / location in the original document which was used for the summary…?

The only place I was able to see, which has the link to the original document was in the “Links” → “incoming links” pane.

5

You could insert a back link, see Annotations popup menu of the inspector.

6

thanks for this idea as well — back links would help, however, as far as I understand, they only work if one edits annotations from within the Annotations pane of the source document.

If I, say, have the source document open in one window, and in the other DT window I have its annotation document open — I would not be able to use the ctrl+cmd+L shortcut to insert the back link.

what could be a workaround?

7

I guess Paste with Source Link…?

8

E.g. Edit > Insert > Item Link…