Suggestion: Add "copy selection and selection link" to contextual menu

It would be great if we could highlight a document’s text and copy the selected text and its link together to be pasted into a second document. I think ngan made this suggestion in 2019.

Define document. There is no singular document type in DEVONthink.

See Edit > Paste with Source Link

By document, I meant any computer file usually created with an application program (such as a word processor). For example, a rtf or markdown note in DT.

Thanks @cgrunenberg. Wonderful. Perfect. Another reason to consider DT as the best writing ecosystem available for Mac.

Christian. This option works well within DT. I am fine with that. However, other folks use external tools to assemble quotes and their sources. I believe an option such as “copy selection and link” in the contextual menu can be a useful tool for them. Think about that!

This is not feasible – or at least non-trivial – given the myriad applications out there. For example, should it work in Word, Pages, Excel, Keynote, etc.? That would not be some simple task as the technologies underlying these applications aren’t all the same.

For example, a Markdown link isn’t going to paste into Pages as a valid hyperlink.

Also, what an application considers a valid hyperlink isn’t standard. URL schemes aren’t supported by all applications, so a DEVONthink item link may not work in certain apps.

Thank you for the suggestion, we’ll consider this for future releases.

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@cgrunenberg Thank you so much for adding the “copy selection with source link” to the new update. This option is a game-changer for any academic workflow. After searching my library for a concept or idea, I can quickly identify relevant quotations with sources, copy them to a single document, and complete my review efficiently.

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@cgrunenberg I found a small problem in the new command. When I “copy selection with source link” followed by “paste and match style” in an RTF document, the source formatting is lost.

I think that expected behaviour as the you are “matching style” with the target RTF document, not where it came from. Try a simple paste if you want to retain formatting.

Usually best for many target apps to “match style” or paste without formatting as sometimes the source copy has some gobbledygook (technical term) that sometimes messes up the target.

Thanks. Yes, a simple paste worked well. I was using RTF within DT.