I’m making sheet music for film music recording sessions. This involves a lot of PDFs for a lot of instruments. My software outputs the files based on the piece of music and sorts them according to the instruments in that particular piece. In this example the Intro has Violin 1 and 2, Cello and Contrabass.
What I am doing at the moment is, after everything has been exported, I make Finder-searches for each instrument and move them into a designated folder, so the printer can print the Violin 1 folder in one go.
My thought was to circumvent this process by applying some rules in DT instead. Selecting all PDFs and classifying just pushes them into my databases.
Is there a way to have DT sort them into subfolders based on instruments? The beginning of each filename is “Project_musical cue name_version numbering” and the end of the file name will always be “- XX_INSTRUMENT NAME”.
I would like to be able to drag the lot in to the DT inbox, perform a rule, and drag it all out again in the correct folder structure.
Side question: where do I find more details and explanation about the expressions and the other settings of your smart rule, so that I can learn them and replicate?
For general stuff about smart rules, see Automation > Smart Rules and Batch Processing in the manual. For more detailed descriptions of individual components, see Appendix > Smart Rule Events and Actions. Item scanning (Scan Name & Scan Text) is covered on p. 252 in the most recent PDF version. The File action is listed on p. 253.
I think Regular Expressions/regEx itself is outside the scope of the manual and only mentioned briefly. It is a feature with a long history in computing, widely used across all manner of software. Chrillek has written an introduction here:
I have found CotEditor a big help in learning regEx. It has syntax highlighting helping you read and understand the patterns (I think BBEdit does the same.) It also highlights different capture groups in your text in different colors, so you get instant feedback. And it has a handly little cheat sheet.
It really is an amazing little editor. I appreciate the juicy Find menu which lets you assign shortcuts to all the individual Find & Replace commands…
I just spotted the Multiple Replace, which I’ve somehow overlooked! I’ve actually really wanted something like that.
Using the Multiple Replacement feature, you can process multiple text replacements at once in succession. The replacement rules can be stored as a named preset and reused when you need.
As @troejgaard mentioned, there is some minimal discussion in the cited chapter, but RegEx is a deep magic
That being said, here is a small extension of the OP’s original inquiry using two captured parts of the name for defining a group and a subgroup then applying another part as a tag on the documents before they’re filed…
would love to know this but damm understanding and learning this takes hours upon hours.
wish there was an AI to summarize this kind of info and get down to 20 min max to understand and create your own smart rule/ batch processing etc.
DevonThink has good gems but dammm by the time I understand it all it would be next year.
especially the info below
for instance in the main Inbox. I have items that contain different tags and would like to move each type of tags to a specific folder. all I know how to do now is to create a smart rule for each tag. if I have like 20 tags I have to create 20 different smart rules? lol
