I have a very simple smart rule to add a document date to a filename:
Most of the time, it works great and adds the date detected in the document to the beginning of the file name, for example “Receipt.pdf” will become “2022-01-20 Receipt.pdf”, assuming that the date 1/20/2022 is somewhere in the receipt.
However, I often print out emails from the Gmail web client directly into DT (Pro 3.8), which look like this:
Invariably, DT cannot detect the date in these emails, and when I try to use the smart rule on, for example, “Test email.pdf”, the filename doesn’t change.
Can the date recognition be improved for such files?
All Databases as a search target and Size is not 0 is a very dangerous combination.
You should be much, much more specific in the target and criteria you apply.
And even if this is just using the On Demand event trigger, you should get in the habit of more safe constructions in smart rules.
In most cases, when I print an email, I end up having to add the date manually. It’s an annoyance. If I tell Safari to include the headers and footers, then it can pick up the date from there with no problem. Maybe I’ll just to that going forward. But it’s a mystery, I thought it’s perhaps a result of the use of the three letter abbreviation for the month.
Can you copy and paste the date from the PDF? @cgrunenberg could regional/language settings in macOS influence whether DT recognises the “day_verbose, month_verbose day_numeric, year_numeric” pattern?
Thanks for the sample! It’s unfortunately an issue of the PDF, the date is on separate lines in the text layer and that’s not recognized. Not sure if it’s caused by Gmail or MailPlane, maybe PDFs generated e.g. by Safari will work as expected.
That’s what I assumed; why did copy&paste work without ado then? I had assumed - wrongly? - that c&p would show that up by pasting a result which mirrored the plain text of the PDF, so in this case was spread across 2 lines.
