This is going to drive me nuts.
I use Papyrus 12.5 for all my writing and I use DT Pro to keep track of it all. Normally all is good but for some unknown reason the occasional papyrus hybrid file (.pap.pdf) will magically become a plain .pdf file that can’t be edited by Papyrus. The files are all in the DT database and I open them from DT using the “open file with” mechanism.
It is totally random and rare. Just every once in a while a hybrid file will become a plain old pdf file. No rhyme or reason noticeable.
Anyone have any ideas or is this computer possessed by the devil?
I haven’t seen that happen to my Papyrus hybrid PDF files. But it should be remembered that, as DEVONthink “sees” those files as PDF, it’s possible to open, edit and save them under a PDF application such as Preview, PDFpenPro or Acrobat, which would them turn the former Papyrus file into a “normal” PDF file that could no longer be edited under Papyrus.
That wonderful hybrid PDF format introduced by Papyrus is still the most universal file format used by any word processor, as the files can be distributed without conversion, as others who don’t have Papyrus 12 can view the documents as PDF. I still use Papyrus 12 for some documents, for that reason. Sometimes, for group comments, I send out Papyrus hybrid PDFs and encourage others to freely annotate them using Skim or Acrobat, and send the annotated PDFs back to me. Those annotated PDFs are no longer editable under Papyrus 12, but serve as a good vehicle to make comments and markups.
But now that DEVONthink 2 can use Leopard’s Quick Look to render a number of file types that were previously unknown to earlier versions of DEVONthink, I find myself using Pages quite often, because I can copy/paste RTFD drafts from my database into Pages, and everything comes over to Pages, including images and their placement. True, the Pages plugin for Quick Look rendering in my database still isn’t as complete as the rendering of a Papyrus hybrid PDF, but Papyrus is no longer the only “universal” way to render a complex but still editable word processing document in a DEVONthink database. And Pages can export as PDF very well.
I still avoid Microsoft Word at almost all costs, however. Word still requires extra work after my RTFD drafts have been brought into Word. I hate that. If I have to send Word output to someone, I’ll export it from Pages. 