I use Summarize Highlights within DT3 extensively to collect highlighted text + Details (usually in the form of user defined comments for each text passage) from fairly long technical or scientific documents all located in DT3. My next step is to export of these text passages and references to Tinderbox to organise and eventually generate an outline which I use in writing my own documents.
Despite improvements to the Summarize Highlights output the process going from DT3 to Tinderbox is still rather clunky. Details on the steps followed can be found in this post in the Tinderbox Forum.
Now to my request. I suggest a 3rd option for Summarize Highlights in addition to RTF and Markdown which generates the output in CSV format. Why CSV ?
CSV is a well recognised format and can be imported and further used in many 3rd party programmes (Excel, Tinderbox, DT Sheets ?)
Summarise Highlights output maps readily into 3 columns (e.g. highlighted PDF text/annotation, page ref, Details)
«class DTty» is raw syntax for type and there’s a known issue with the conversion from type into a string when a compiled script is run from within DEVONthink.
However it seems that’s not causing the problem here. There’s something missing (“missing value”) - either the indexed group or the record inside the repeat.
That’s very strange as the script (of course) first gets the indexed group and if this wouldn’t be possible DEVONthink would throw an error - but not the one your capture shows.
At the moment I’ve no idea what might be going on, I also ran the script from DEVONthink’s script menu and it’s working fine.
Could you please verify that the UUID is the one of an existing group?
You can create a table in “TSV” format – tab separated values. I suppose most table calculations can work with that (Numbers can, in any case, and who’d need anything else on a Mac ).
If you really need a CSV (comma separated values), it’s trivial to convert the tabs to commas.
Tinderbox accepts TSV via dragging or pasting but the latter doesn’t make sense with a repeat. I also find creating a TSV far more complicated than simply creating a CSV formatted text record and afterwards changing its extension.
There’s one more thing why an indexed group is necessary: If you drag a TSV or CSV directly from within DEVONthink into Tinderbox it will be imported as a Tinderbox reference to a DEVONthink record - not as the actual file type TSV or CSV.
However it’s great how you all care how to make the script better
The “problem” with only creating a CSV file is that they can’t be dragged into Tinderbox directly, we first have to export the record, then drag from the Finder as otherwise Tinderbox doesn’t parse the CSV and creates a note with a DEVONthink reference instead - but I guess you know that . That leaves us with a CSV record in DEVONthink and a CSV file in Finder.
).
. That leaves us with a CSV record in DEVONthink and a CSV file in Finder.