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Lee, here's the answer to your question. How to "back out" to the original document after a search from the Three Panes view: 1) Clear the query by clicking on the "X" symbol in the Search field. Your original document will be highlighted. OR 2) Click on the "back" triangle to the left of the URL field. There's your original document. What's neat is that if you now click the forward triangle you can see the search result document you viewed (or, with another click of the forward button, another search result that was selected and viewed). Clicking (multiple times if needed) will again) let you travel back to the original document. Disclaimer: I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. |
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Yes, DEVONthink databases can have all their documents sent to and stored in the Finder. That has always been the case. The user's data is not "locked" into the DEVONthink database and is fully recoverable. |
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System-wide contextual menu plugins are more tricky than most people recognize. There are too many bad ones out there already. I don't have enough fingers on my hands (10) to tick off the number of contextual menu plugins I've had to remove from my computers to eliminate errors they caused. Contextual menus are included in future plans for DEVONthink, but only if they prove 'clean' enough to avoid creating system errors. Disclaimer: I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. |
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jminnihan, I'm sorry you experienced problems, but DT Pro has been around since 2005, so I was surprised by your comment to wait for the next version. DT Pro makes many more calls to the Mac operating system than do most applications, and so needs the operating system to be in good shape. When users experience stability problems and report that, we offer to review DT Pro's crash log. Almost invariably the problem was caused by installation of a utility that modifies the OS or by a poorly written third party input manager. Modifications to the operating system, unless carefully written and tested, can cause unintended results such as memory errors that can cascade to a problem. Even well written modification code can break after an Apple update and cause problems. As a very heavy user of DT Pro myself, I can say that I don't experience stability problems. The last time I had to resort to a backup was more than two years ago, and I was running a non-public beta version at the time. I keep OS X in pretty stock condition and run preventive maintenance every week or two. Disclosure: I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. |
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Please don't confuse the fact that DT databases are not currently Spotlight indexable, with the supposition that the contents of a DT database cannot be completely recovered to the Finder at any time. If DEVONtechnologies were to go out of business, your data is not 'captured'. Simply export all your files to the Finder. That has been a design feature since DEVONthink's introduction in 2002. But yes, I've seen some other document manager applications, especially in the Windows world, that have made it difficult for users to leave them. :-) Disclaimer: I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. |
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We've had a lot of requests for the new features in DT Pro Office. Many users (such as a small law office) can really use them. But not everyone needs them. If they had been added to DT Pro, the price of DT Pro would have to increase, because of the added development costs and the fact that a license fee has to be paid for the OCR engine. So we have two products. DT Pro 1.x (with no price increase) and DT Pro Office 1.x, with an appropriate price. Disclaimer. I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. |
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Oops. My comment on topical grouping of databases and on organization were intended to be posted to Pollet's comment, and I have now posted it there. However, please note that the price of DT Pro 1.x hasn't changed, so I don't understand your comment about the upgrade policy. Disclaimer: I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. |
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My own approach as a heavy user of DT Pro is to use topical databases. I'm currently managing a hundred thousand or so documents among several topical databases. My main database, which focusses primarily on my interest in environmental science, technology and regulatory and policy issues comprises about 21,000 documents and about 24 million total words. It runs smartly (in more senses than one) on my MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM. I'm in process of building an associated database covering chemical analytical methodologies (both US and EU), statistical and other procedures and issues related to the evaluation of environmental data, sampling methodologies, etc. This may likely grow larger than my main database. Splitting out the very specific methodological material not only keeps my main database speedier, but keeps the AI features and searches in my main database from being diluted by the specifics in the methodologies database. That's important. As to organizational structure, personally I've never considered my organization hierarchical. I approach organization as putting 'clusters' of related content into groups, as well as 'clustering' related groups. Many of my documents are replicated into two or more groups. Likewise, I often replicate a group into two or more 'clusters' of groups. I will use smart groups to replicate documents for a particular purpose, or replicate results of a search into a new group of related items. I rarely tag individual documents, as I rely on the combination of grouping, searches and the 'See Also' AI feature to identify material in the process of a research project. DT Pro provides other tricks such as Option-click on a term to see other documents that use that term, Command-/ to initiate a search on a text string, and 'See Selected Text' to provide a list of potentially related documents. In the process of a project I'll often create rich text notes linking to documents of special interest, or 'mark' them temporarily (I usually clear such marks later) using label or state marking. Disclosure; I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. (12/5/2006, Version: 1.3b) |
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My own approach as a heavy user of DT Pro is to use topical databases. I'm currently managing a hundred thousand or so documents among several topical databases. My main database, which focusses primarily on my interest in environmental science, technology and regulatory and policy issues comprises about 21,000 documents and about 24 million total words. It runs smartly (in more senses than one) on my MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM. I'm in process of building an associated database covering chemical analytical methodologies (both US and EU), statistical and other procedures and issues related to the evaluation of environmental data, sampling methodologies, etc. This may likely grow larger than my main database. Splitting out the very specific methodological material not only keeps my main database speedier, but keeps the AI features and searches in my main database from being diluted by the specifics in the methodologies database. That's important. As to organizational structure, personally I've never considered my organization hierarchical. I approach organization as putting 'clusters' of related content into groups, as well as 'clustering' related groups. Many of my documents are replicated into two or more groups. Likewise, I often replicate a group into two or more 'clusters' of groups. I will use smart groups to replicate documents for a particular purpose, or replicate results of a search into a new group of related items. I rarely tag individual documents, as I rely on the combination of grouping, searches and the 'See Also' AI feature to identify material in the process of a research project. DT Pro provides other tricks such as Option-click on a term to see other documents that use that term, Command-/ to initiate a search on a text string, and 'See Selected Text' to provide a list of potentially related documents. In the process of a project I'll often create rich text notes linking to documents of special interest, or 'mark' them temporarily (I usually clear such marks later) using label or state marking. Disclosure; I'm the Evangelist for DEVONtechnologies. |
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Papyrus gets 5 stars from me because it does two things no other word processor does for me, and both things meet my needs. [1] It's the first powerful word processor that produces editable output fully compatible with my DEVONthink Pro databases. Not only is the text of those Papyrus documents fully searchable and analyzable, the layout including footnotes, endnotes, images, spreadsheet tables, etc. is viewed in my databases exactly as in Papyrus. And that includes working hyperlinks for URLs, mail addresses and internal 'bookmark' hyperlinks. From my DEVONthink Pro database I can select such a document, click a button to open it under Papyrus, then edit and save it. The changes are then visible in my database next time I look at the document. And I'm looking at the actual document including images, footnotes, full layout, everything. I can't do that with Word, Mellel, Pages or any other word processor above the level of TextEdit. That's because Papyrus 12 for Mac OS X can produce editable PDFs. Fully, absolutely, completely editable PDFs saved with the "pap.pdf" suffix. That's a WOW! feature, and the reason I bought Papyrus 12. [2] I'm doing a project that results in lots of PDFs. Those files are reviewed by several people who often request changes. In the past, I've had to do the dreaded two-step. I've had to find and open the original document created under another application, edit and save it, then create a PDF version of the changed file. No more. Now I just open the PDF generated by Papyrus, make changes and save the file. That's it. No second step required, no duplication of material on the drive. Perhaps you won't understand why I appreciate that one-step edit/save process until you are faced with managing dozens of PDFs that have a number of requests for changes. Summary: For my needs Papyrus 12 is wonderful. For those who need to include powerful spreadsheet table elements within a document (which can read data from other files as well), it's very good. For those who need very large documents, with the capability of generating a linked table of contents, it works well. For those who might need complete compatibility with MS Word documents, it's not that great, but can capture the text of Word documents. For those who need fully editable PDFs produced by a capable word processor, there's nothing like Papyrus. The developers note that Papyrus may be able to open "normal" PDFs in the future. As I work with a lot of OCR'd PDFs, I hope that would let me correct OCR errors. |
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