Hi everyone. I raised this yonks back, but I keeep finding myself wishing DT had the ability to search for docs that have highlighting in them. I often highlight key text in RTFs, and combing highlighting with other search options could be very useful.
Might this be a feature in DT2?
I’m surprised that no one has responded to this. I had assumed that DTP could search by highlight color and was disappointed when I realized it couldn’t (as it could do almost anything else!). While tags and comments apply to the document or group level, highlighting could effectively tag at the sentence and paragraph level, which are usually the exact things I need to quote.
I have rtf versions of JSTOR articles, dissertations, web articles, my own writings, complete books from Gutenberg, and much more. It would be beyond phenomenal if I could, as i was reviewing these materials, highlight passages of interest that I might like to refer or quote in a research document. Each color might represent a subject, section or sub-section in a larger project, e.g. red = portamento or Chapter 1; green = rubato or Chapter 2 and so on. A later search for the green highlight would yield all the passages, throughout the database, refering to rubato that I had found interesting and potentially useful and I could easily incorporate them into my writing.
I currently export a document to Scrivener and highlight there. Although Scrivener can’t search by color, it can find the next instance of a given color. It has the added advantage being able to assign highlight colors to different subjects for each project (i.e., Scrivener document) while a change DTP is reflected in all databases.
But if there’s a way to already do what I’ve outlind above, I am open to any suggestions!
Technically, the highlight color is just a change of the background color of the RTF text. This change is not indexed by DEVONthink and so not searchable at the moment.
However, we may evaluate the possibility to add annotations to some file types that support such metadata, that are then searchable. But, nothing concrete has been implemented yet.
Id forgotten about this original post of mine… I still think its a good idea.
On that ‘note’, would the file types that are supported include RTF and PDF?
Andrew 
Definitely PDF, as it supports annotations out-of-the-box. For RTF, we’re not sure.
Would this annotations update (presumably DT2) be similar to Skim? And would the annotations be viewable in another PDF reader, or be particular to DT?
On a sidenote, Mellel has markers kind of like scrivener, where you can jump from marker to marker.
PDF annotations would be similar to Preview or Acrobat, and, of course, viewable in any PDF viewer that shows them.
Please make it better than Preview! - those are pretty poorly implemented.
When de do it, we’ll use PDF annotations, not the crappy graphics objects that Preview uses. We have no idea why Apple did it this way as there are proper annoation methods defined in PDF.
Great! Really looking forward to it!
Any further thoughts on this topic these days?
Searching by highlighting would be most, extremely way cool awesome.