Jerry, there are two ways of capturing files from your drive into a database.
Import, or drag & drop: The file is copied into your database (with the sole exceptions of Word .doc files, in which case rich text is captured but the actual .doc file remains linked to but external and without synchronization; and “unknown” file types, which are ignored unless the option to capture them is checked in Preferences > Import).
Imported RTF files can be edited, and invoking Open With will allow them to be opened under any appropriate application (although editing and saving in another application can produce unexpected data loss of the edited file, unless one realizes that ‘Open With’ is not the same as ‘Edit With’ for text-type files).
Index, or Command-Option-drag & drop: Text content from ‘known’ file types will be captured into the database but is read-only. Indexed documents retain a Path link to the original file, which remains in the Finder. “Unknown” file types will be linked if that preferences item is checked. Using ‘Launch Path’ will open the external file under its parent application, while ‘Open With’ will open the file under any appropriate application. Edits and saves result in modification of the external file. There is one-way synchronization from the external file to its counterpart in the database, so changes in the external file result in changes in the database content (but not the reverse).
There can be good reasons for using one or the other capture modes in creating a database, or even for mixing the capture modes in the same database.
Indexed captures result in a lower memory overhead when loading a database. Indexed documents – especially text-type documents – require less thought by the user when external edits are made, especially for Word .doc files.
I recommend Index captures of MS Word documents for anyone who needs to frequently edit and/or print them in their original form.
In my case, as I favor highly portable databases, I want them to be self-contained and so I use the Import capture mode – which means that I hate Word files and avoid them as much as possible (often converting them to PDF).
I encourage new users not to regard DT Pro as some sort of replacement for the Finder. Don’t simply Index your hard drive into a database. For one thing, if you have a great many files, the database may become unresponsive unless you have a lot of physical RAM. For another thing, that may reduce the effectiveness of the artificial intelligence features of DT Pro, which have become indispensable to me.
I’m managing well over a hundred thousand documents among a number of databases, each with a different purpose reflecting my interests and research needs. And I’ve got many, many thousands of other files that I have no current intention of placing into my databases.
My main database is topical, focussed on my professional interests in environmental science and technology, policy issues, laws and regulations in several countries, and international environmental science exchanges and associate resources for graduate studies. As a result it covers a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines, toxicology and health effects, laws and regulations, economics, and so on. But it’s topical, the contents really do have relationships to each other, and I make a great deal of use of DT Pro’s ability to suggest relationships between documents in my database using artificial intelligence assistants such as ‘See Also’. I keep it ‘trimmed’ to a size of about 21,000 documents and about 24 million words, and it’s very responsive on my laptop.
By contrast, I’m building another large database dealing with environmental sampling and analytical methodologies and associated quality assurance methods, problems and methodologies for evaluating environmental data and so forth.
Clearly, those two databases are topically related. Why separate them? Two reasons: (a) combining them would result in a database with sluggish performance on my MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM, and I wouldn’t like that; (b) when I’m doing research, for example, on toxicology and health effects of mercury in fish, I don’t want a ‘See Also’ list to drown out the ‘interesting’ material with a great deal of minutiae about the technical details of preparing and analyzing samples of fish flesh.
Future versions of DT Pro will allow larger databases with even more speed and future Mac notebooks will allow lots more RAM. Even then, however, I think there will be advantages to designing modular, topical databases. I’ve got a version of my two environmental databases described above that combines them into a single database. My Power Mac G5 dual core with 5 GB RAM runs that database with respectable speed. But the ‘See Also’ results for a document about health effects of mercury in fish really do show the problem of too much minutiae about sampling and analysis. Quite often, less is more.
I use DT Pro not just to store documents, or to search across a collection of documents, but to help me analyze the information content of my references and, perhaps, see relationships among concepts that I hadn’t thought of.