Dear all,
I’ve just wrote a simple script to automatically highlight and export quotes while reading a rtf or pdf document, so to have them collected all toghether in a separate document with clickable links to the source for every quotation. This solves my problem to have a way to automatically highlight and collect the salient parts when reading a paper, to have them listed for a simpler and faster review, and to be able to jump for each of them, directly to the original source page of the quotation, without doing manually the copy/paste operations from the source to the summary document. I hope that can be useful to other users that read several scientific papers every day and need simple and fast a way to summarize and track back.
To use the script, select the text you want to quote from a rtf or pdf document then just execute the script from “menu Data > New from Template > QuoteHighlight&Annotate” or by typing Cmd-Alt-Q (“Q” stands for “Quote”): a record called “Quotations&Annotations:” will be opened (or created if it doesn’t exist yet, in the group named “Quotations&Annotations” ) and the selected text from the source document will be appended as a new quotation at the end of the record, toghether with an hyperlink to its source and a slot where you can type your annotations.
Unfortunately I’ve found that highlight is scriptable only for rtf source documents, content attribute scripting seems not to be supported at the moment for pdf documents, so this script automatically highlight quotations only in rtf sources not in pdf (I have to do it manually for every citation), but it helps to easy export quotations and links for both.
I’ve wrote this adapting the original ‘Annotations’ script (by Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann and Christian Grunenberg © 2009 DEVONtechnologies, LLC), and with the help of many code fragments found around the forum (I haven’t kept track of authors while surfing, so please forgive me and add you your own credits if you recognize part of the code from some your post).
Install the script package “_QuoteHighlight&Annotate___Cmd-Alt-Q.templatescriptd” in ‘~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Templates.noindex’.
Feedback and improvements are welcome!
The following is an example of a couple of quotations obtained selecting some text and running the script for each selection:
Quotation, Page 1:
The role and importance of interaction structure is a central yet unresolved issue in mathematical epidemiology (1). At the broadest level, the issue is straightforward: clearly not all people interact equally with all others;
Link: x-devonthink-item://32CD0658-64F9-4A49-87F6-F30AB3A515DD?page=0
Annotation:
(type here your annotations)
Quotation, Page 5:
Aside from highlighting the importance of stochastic, rare events, the multiscale and resurgent properties of epidemics in our model suggest that population structure itself can act as a kind of control.
Link: x-devonthink-item://32CD0658-64F9-4A49-87F6-F30AB3A515DD?page=4
Annotation:
(type here your annotations)
Here it is the downloadable zipped package of v1.0 (but v1.1 is coming soon RECTIFICATION: I hope it will come soon, but I’m very busy in these days ):
_QuoteHighlight&Annotate___Cmd-Alt-Q.templatescriptd.zip (152 KB)
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. As I am working on my Literature Review for my dissertation, this is so handy and will make the workflow using Devonthink much smoother.
See your next question.
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