Although there are some fantastic annotation scripts in this forum, sometimes in my workflow I want to quickly collect text from a PDF to act on later. For example as I am reading a journal article I might see another article that I would like to read at another time. Until recently my workflow would involve highlighting the text of the reference, copying it and then pasting it into an electronic notebook or plain text file. Using PopClip https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/ I have created a very simple extension that speeds up this process with just one mouse click. The extension will append highlighted text as a bulleted list, in any application, to a markdown file that I index in DevonThink.
A copy of the PopClip extension is found here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86554049/ScratchPad.popclipext.zip.
The PopClip extension is a package consisting of a PNG file, a PLIST file and a shell script. The shell script (scratchpad.sh) within the package content will need to be modified to point it to the location of the file that you will index within DevonThink.
- Open the package content of ScratchPad.popclipext (right click and “show package contents”).
- Open “scratchpad.sh” in a text editor
- Change the following code to point to the path where you will index the Scratchpad file
echo "* $POPCLIP_TEXT " >> "/Users/username/path_to_scratchpad/Scratchpad.md"
Once you have done this install the PopClip extension by double clicking on it and it should be ready to go.