Why does DN don´t know Pages?

DEVONthink Feedback
1

I am a new Devon User, after testing i now get my License for Devon Think Pro
I use Devon for my private database and also for my projects.
And here are some problems.
Everytime when i import pages and numbers sheets, DN tells me :

unknown format

I can get them into my database and they where also be opend, but i always fear that something can get lost. I also don´t want only to link them to the original.
So there are some questions.
First can there be some datas get lost and
why can´t a special Mac designed Programm don´t identify Macs own datas? Perhaps not a big problem, but i am a little bit scaried about

Thanks in advance

2

Just enable the import of unknown files (see Preferences > Import),

3

That´s what i did.
And they also will be imported without any draw, but all the the time there is the box with “unknown formats”

4

The current version of DEVONthink can’t read Pages documents. But DEVONthink 2, to be released later this year, will be able to display your Pages documents.

In the meantime, you can search by Name your Pages documents that have been captured into your database, and you can enter searchable keywords or notes into the document’s Comment field in the Info panel.

From your database you can Launch a Pages document under Pages. Important documents can be “printed” as PDF to your database. In Pages, press Command-P to invoke the Print panel. Click on the PDF button, then select Print to DEVONthink Pro. Choose the group into which you wish the PDF to be stored.

5

This is what I do. I find it useful to work on a file in Pages until it reaches the final draft stage. At that point I export to PDF, so it’s in the relevant folder on my HD, and then pull it into DTPO. Not quite got to the point of trusting DTPO as my only repository, but I’m getting there! 8)

When DTPO can open Pages and Numbers files, maybe I’ll be willing to move over completely, but it does depend on it handling them as native Mac files - none of the conversion you get with Word docs…

6

Ok, thanks for your answer. So there´s nothing to worry about.
And i can look forward to DT 2.

7

To my knowledge Apple hasn’t published the specifications of the file formats of Pages and Numbers. Apple uses it’s own proprietary and unpublished formats.

A developer can look into the files and try to figure out the specs.
Maybe this is not too difficult in the case of Pages and Numbers as the file formats are based on XML-synthax and are not in a binary format.

But the main problem remains: to make the files readable (and editable?) in Devon is a hack. It’s unsupported and if Apple changes only a comma in the next release of Pages or Numbers it might break.

Lesson: unpublished proprietary formats are no good.
(Same as DRM – no good).
And Devontechnologies can do pretty much nothing to change that.

I got burnt although I knew and had to convert all my Pages Documents to .rtf, which was a pain because Pages’ export to .rtf is rudimentary and didn’t work for my files (footnotes, formatting, layout).

8

This shouldn’t be all that hard to deal with properly. DEVONthink can just import the file and do nothing with it… and enable QuickLook so you can view it (but not edit it) in DEVONthink. If you want to edit it, then double-clicking it would open it in Pages.

I would suspect (though assuming can be dangerous :wink: that this would be the 2.0 approach. Leopard and Quicklook can take a lot of load off, though of course it would then require 10.5. But after a year, it’s probably time to get on the bus.