Search behaviour in DTTG

DEVONthink To Go
1

Hi,

with the Cambrian explosion of new feature in DTTG3 (great work DEVON Team!), i am trying to make DTTG3 my default PDF reader. Especially, I appreciate the option to generate summarized note with the highlights as markdown when back on DT3 with all the links to the main PDF. This is killer feature for books notes which can be used for further ever-green notes.

But what really puzzles me at the moment is search. When using search in other applications, search function points me to the places in the file where the word was found directly, Then i click thru them easily directly from the main search window. It seems that DTTG only offers me a list of files where it found a term but I am expected to then use search second time (litte magnifying glass symbol) on a concrete file?

What do i miss?

I want the search in DTTG3 to point me to pages in the PDF where a term was found directly. Is this not possible today?

1 Like
2

No it’s not possible and has been covered many times in the forums (including once today of yesterday, I believe).

PDF is the only format supporting in-document searching at this time.

3

Understood re PDF support only.
My question was why when I search in DTTG3 and it finds PDFs it does not point me to the pages in the PDF directly - it just points me to a PDF (and I need to search again for the same within that PDF)? If it is able to search in PDFs, it has the information at its hands when I do the global search?

How do people use search then? Is this what the current flow is:

  1. search in global search for a PDF
  2. search within every found PDF by manually tipping in the search term again?
4

I would appreciate that feature as well. It’s one that Keep It has (transfers the global search to in-document search and highlights all found occurences) and I noticed myself missing it after switching to DTTG.

5

The search function in PDFs is provided by the third-party framework. It is not part of DEVONthink To Go’s search function.

It may be possible to open a PDF with an active search but Development would have to assess that behavior.

6

Thanks for details @BLUEFROG Even if it is a 3rd party framework, the functionality is there. As a user I only care about end result :slight_smile: My point is about a two step process for search which, when compared to other apps providing search in PDF, seems different to me. Other apps do not ask me to re-type my search term twice, neither is DT3 on my Mac. It just leads me to search results in the doc, highlighting the occasions in the file.

Thanks for considering this for future updates.

1 Like