So…HOLY COW! I just discovered the summarize feature a few days ago, and wow it’s impressive. There are a lot of drawbacks to devonthink (I run the Pro Office), not least that the one time I managed to get the DevonThink to go app to work it instantly took up nearly 100gigs on my iPad Pro. Finally just gave up on that one.
I digress. I am working on my dissertation in historical theology, focusing on Karl Barth’s use of Amandus Polanus (a reformed scholastic theologian) to amend Calvin’s doctrine of God. It’s very technical, uses specialized language (often in Latin or German), and so I really wasn’t expecting much of the summarize feature - not because DevonThink Pro Office is lacking in some way, but summarizing a few paragraphs from a journal article would be a challenge for any software. But, I have been very surprised that it actually can summarize, with surprising accuracy, even fairly technical research. It even makes sense and reads well, which is not what I expected. I expected something a bit like Google translate where one might get the idea of the text, but the word order will inevitably be dysfunctional. Well, this cynic is very VERY impressed…give it a try (especially if you have to work through a massive amount of research).
How and when does this work? I selected a PDF (a scientific paper) and selected then the whole text (or just parts of it) and wanted to “summarize” it by clicking “Summarize” in the “Edit-Menu” like it is described in the Documentation, but it’s greyed out.
I have the same question as well. The “Edit” → “Summarize” menu item remains greyed out regardless of the text selection in PDF or other text format documents, including regular .txt files.
I was however able to activate the feature through the Services menu item “DevonThink 3: Summarize” after selecting text in a document. This creates a separate RTF file containing the selected text’s summary.
Perhaps @BLUEFROG can shed some light on this behavior.
Edit: This is on DevonThink 3 version. 3.6.3 running on Big Sur.
Yes. The service menu item works with PDFs (that have a text layer) as well.
@cgrunenberg , interestingly, for editable text (RTF, markdown, plain-text, etc.), the “Summarize” menu item is enabled only if the document is not locked. This does make sense from the editable requirement, but is IMHO, non-intuitive.
