I have a large number of records that I’ve been going through and high lightening text relevant to a project. In cases where the text (in the appropriate form) isn’t present, I move the record to a “not relevant” folder. Today I discovered that, in the eye-blurring process of sorting through 50k+ of these records, I had inadvertently moved records with the correct text (that was also highlighted) into this folder. Is there a way I can search the folder for highlighted text of any sort (just searching for a term or phrase won’t work)?
e.g. For whatever reason, if I had the sentences “Bob ran to the store” and “Fred is a good swimmer,” would there be a way to track them both down based solely on the fact they were highlighted?
It would probably be faster to use the script Scripts > Data > Merge Highlights (Rich). If this script is not installed, open Help > Support Assistant > Install Extras > Scripts and install “Merge Highlights (2)” (for RTF). Select a group of RTFs and run the script. The script will create a document named “Highlights” in the current group. The document will list the name (a clickable link) of each RTF(D) document that has highlighted text and the highlighted text from that document. Working with the “Highlights” document, you can decide what to do with the documents it finds. You could also modify that script if you wish.
Works fine over here. If a large number of documents is selected the script will take time to operate, giving the appearance that DEVONthink is in a hang. If there is an actual hang state you should be able to find a hang report in the console, and if you find one it is useful to send it to Support.
? I do not understand.
If i do not perform a search (with the result of highlighting the found words) how can the script merge the highlighted found words?
Emilio, you incorrectly assumed that the highlighting of search terms in the results list resulted in a change in the properties of the files, such as a searchable highlight markup. That’s not true. That’s why the script didn’t work for you.
What Bill is saying is that the script works with document passages that have been highlighted with the Format>Highlight command, or command-shift-L.
You could do the search that you tried earlier, then apply the Highlight command (menu or command-shift-L), and DEVONthink will highlight all the search terms. Once you have done that, the script will work for you.
I am sorry! I understood wrongly. Now it is clear that the script search and collect only words that are highlighted by the reader and not by the software when it performs a search.
