I am sure I’m missing something obvious, but I just can’t see it (obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing this!).
I have a mess of text notes, pdf’s Web pages most of which contains some information I need. However, I can’t see the wood for the trees. What i would like to be able to do is to copy relevant bits from wherever in the database and add them to one document so that I can print out just what i need, not tens of pages with little of relevance on them.
Can someone please put me out of my misery and point me gently at the obvious method of doing this? I’ve tried highlights and annotations but they don’t seem to do what I want, at least not easily.
There is no singular correct way of handling things like this. Everyone has a different perspective on information organization and what is most effective to them.
@DTLow’s suggestion of opening a document and copying and pasting is a reasonable one, based on what you’re describing so far.
I was going to say the same thing @DTLow said. It sounds like what you want is going to just require the work of copying and pasting whatever you want from each document into the “master” document. For all you le PDFs you could do all your annotations and then select all and summarize, giving you one doc with all the annotations from each PDF. Then paste everything else from your other documents into that one. Good luck!
As noted, copy + paste to some (other) open document … but …
What has not be addressed is the unstated yet perhaps lurking in the background desire to have the copied snippets hyperlinked back to the source content.
Does DT or DT + (some other app) offer a method to drag + drop content from a DT document to another “collection bin” document (in DT or in the other app) while maintaining a hyperlink back to the source content?
I use an Applescript to extract the selected text and hyperlink
tell application id "DNtp"
set theOriginalNote to item 1 of (get selection)
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "c" using {command down}
set theSelectedText to the clipboard
set theOriginalLink to reference URL of theOriginalNote
...
end tell
Much obliged. I see also that this approach could be taken to massage the contents on the clipboard into whatever hyperlink syntax might be appropriate to paste elsewhere.
Many thanks for the swift responses. Selecting the annotations and using thee summarize feature sounds very useful in this context.
Other than that, looks like copy and paste it is! I’ll just simply plug away.
Thanks again
So… I’ve been experimenting and having problems. (Surprise!)
I have added annotations to three documents and tried various ways of using the "Summarize annotations’ links in different menus and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to find any document created from this action.
However, I’ve found that if I select all three and use the ‘Merge’ menu then I get what I thought I would get with the ‘Summarize’ menu. So… that works, but not as I thought.
Next, I tried using the help in this post so that I could add both the filenmae and the url to the annotation, but I cannot seem to be able to do that. Big problem is that on the Insert placeholder, there is no such thing as %documentName%. Also I tried to increase the font to 14 pt but it shows up at 18pt.
Plus I’m uncertain as to the steps needed to have the annotation be as I want. Do I highlight and copy the text I want from the pdf, then paste it into the annotation window and then select the template or copy, then select and then paste? It seems that if put the cursor into the annotation window and then select the template I then have to paste the text into the appropriate area of the template, which doesn’t seem quite right somehow, as most other bits and pieces of DT seem to work more smoothly.
I’m quite sure I’m missing something very obvious, but am unable to see what it is
Really as @DTLow says, I can’t see an improvement on copy/paste. I do this a lot, I delete as I go often using cmnd + x, so I don’t get confused.
Make sure you keep a copy of the original doc of course in some other place, the problem is avoiding getting confused but I have found this the best way. I do it a lot. There are elaborate tricks on line but I have never found them useful. In effect one is editing and filtering as one does it, which is often what is really important.
This is human/meatware stuff but a habit I have picked up from picture editing is always putting sources on the left side of the screen (or the left screen if you’re a multi monitor type) and destinations on the right. I follow this with moving folders around (compiling hard drives being to sent to archive) and moving things around in DevonThink from DB to DB.
Helps when you’re tired and working late, one less thing you have to remember, i.e. which messy block of text and pictures is the source, and which is destination.
If you want to merge many ‘copies’ into a single paste into a new document, you can use a clipboard manager. There is one in Alfred for MacOS if you have the power pack.