Superslow sync that hangs partway through

I’ve just started trying to use DEVONthink Pro Office and DTTG to get a corpus of (mainly PDF) documents onto the iPad 2 in a searchable format. Specificially, there are 1245 documents in this test database I’m trying to synchronize, for a total of about 1 gig.

Initiating synchronisation is no problem. The problem I have is that when DEVONthink gets stuck on some folders, making no progress. For example, it is currently stuck on “Neurology”, where it has been for the last 3 hours. This folder contains ~10mb of pdfs in subfolders. As such, despite trying to remove some folders the sync never gets more than about 1/6th of the way through, before DTTG reports a timeout.

By comparison, copying ~800Mb of PDFs into Goodreader over wifi is done in about 5-10 mins.

Although finding there was no facility to highlight search terms in individual PDFs in DTTG was disappointing, I was prepared to tolerate that by using an external application like Goodreader for this purpose, just using DTTG for its ability to do indexed full text searching across a corpus of documents via SQLite. However, the situation with synchronization makes DEVONthink genuinely useless to me.

So I have two issues:
How do I fix the sync problem?
When will the facility to highlight search terms in PDFs be coming? I would have thought this would be relatively easy (cache the page number or location on that page of each term in your database when you build it on the Mac side) but of course software development is rarely as straightforward as one thinks…

Unfortunately, I don’t have any ideas offhand. However, I can send you a debug version of the Sync Agent that should give me useful information. Here are the steps to do that:

  1. Download the Sync Agent from devontechnologies.com/people … bundle.zip
  2. Quit DEVONthink Pro
  3. Unzip the Sync Agent and move it to ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Plugins
  4. Start DEVONthink Pro
  5. Open Console.app (in Applications/Utilities) to watch for log messages (you can narrow these down by filtering for “devon”)

Try syncing again. If it fails or stalls, please copy the log messages from Console.app (select the rows and copy them) or take a screenshot and email them to support@devon-technologies.com, mentioning this thread when you do.

Those should give me a better idea of what might be happening.

I’m not sure. Right now we’re using the web view built into iOS to display PDFs. I have not looked into this particular functionality yet, but I’m not sure how much we can manipulate the display of the web view when displaying non-HTML content.

However, we’re in the process of looking for a better PDF viewer (right now we’re using the web view built into iOS) and ideally that will give us this functionality for free. :slight_smile: