devonthink seems to be the ultimate tool for my chaotic stored infos. but i never used something like that before. the user manual doesn´t help me very much. is there anything like examples how to work? i am especially interested in how to copy out of pdf-files which are shown in the devon-browser after finding them. how to do it in the original file with acrobat i know. can i use out of devon the acrobat 5.0-capabilities? thanks in advance
Hi Lanassa,
Assuming the original pdf contains some text, and has not been custom encoded or encrypted, you can import this in RTF format. Although any original images will be lost, it will be easy for you to copy and paste sections of text, with the added advantage that your text string searches will be highlighted too.
It is possible to have both a ‘PDF+Text’ and a ‘RTF’ version of the same original pdf document in your DT (DEVONthink) database. The ‘PDF+Text’ version will allow you to see images, whilst the ‘RTF’ version will allow you to search and copy and paste text.
To enable the PDF document to be converted to RTF, in the DEVONthink preferences, under the ‘Images & PDF’ tab, check the ‘Convert to Rich Text’ box before importing the pdf document.
Right clicking/ control clicking the ‘PDF+Text’ document name in DT will give you an option to open the document externally. You could then open the document in Adobe Reader for example, use the ‘Select Text’ tool in Adobe Reader to select text passages you want, the copy and paste the highlighted text into a new rich text document created in DT.
A new rich text document is created by clicking on the ‘New Rich Text’ icon, top left of the main DT window. Unfortunately, the services to ‘Take Plain/Rich Text Note’ were greyed out when attempted this via. Adobe Reader, but the copy and paste method should work okay.
Note, if you double click the file name of the RTF document, the document will open in a new window, where there is an option the convert the rich text document to plain text.
David