I’m new to DevonThink and have really been enjoying it. There’s one feature, though, that would make a big difference for me…
Currently a tag makes reference to a particular document. I’d like to be able to highlight a portion of text within the document and create a tag for just the selected text. Thus, tags could be at the document level, or text level. The tagged text might then change in appearance (e.g., color, box around it, etc.) to indicate that it is tagged.
Some thoughts regarding related features:
⁃ there’s a separate tag bar for portions of text that are tagged within a file. i.e., in addition to the bar where you can add new tags to the whole file, there’s another where you can see what tags are being used for portions within the text, as well as for adding new tags to highlighted portions
⁃ the tagged portions within a document would also automatically create a new text file with that text quoted, perhaps in italics or something else to show it’s a direct quote. Then you could make other comments relevant to this section below. This new text file could show up as being hierarchically inside of the parent file, similar to the folder system, but the text doc would remain a text file. Or you could just make it possible to add comments specific to the tagged portion
What’s the rationale?
⁃ Reason 1: beneficial and complementary to current system. Currently, you might want to keep text together in a single document (e.g., it includes notes for a book you read, and you want to keep the notes in one document, but there are certain things within the document that you want to tag for easy retrieval). This way, a tag can refer to more specific content than the entire file. I often want to tag a particular phrase within a document, but see no way of doing it.
⁃ Reason 2: qualitative data analysis. This change would also make DevonThink a powerful tool for qualitative data analysis. There is not currently any good software for macs (PC examples of such software are NVivo and Atlas*TI), making DevonThink appealing to an even broader market.
Is something like this possible? Or is there already some other way to get it to do something like this?
Thanks!
Matt