DEVONThink users unite (especially if you're exporting info from Logos to DT)

I'm finally about to break down and buy a license to DEVONThink Pro. I was trying to organize reams of info that I had collected while working on an MA a few years back, and DEVONThink Pro's enhanced database app is the best tool I've found.

It occurred to me that there are probably a lot of Logos users who also use DT to help manage their research. If so, I'd love to be directed to any websites, blogs, tutorials or whatever where I could see examples. I've found tutorials and examples produced by people using DT for historical research, for running law practices, and for general home and office management. But I haven't run across examples of DT setups which are specifically geared toward, say, exegetical research.

Any ideas or suggestions out there?

{Logos, forgive me for using your forum to ask about third party software. If I'm able to attract some interest, we'll certainly be sharing ideas about how to get info from Logos into DEVONThink research databases. The two systems strike me as being natural research companions.)

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Rick Mansfield (Logos)

I've used DTP for nearly two decades I think--has it been around that long? Well, since the early days, anyway.

I don't know what I could point you to specifically for getting started, but I can tell you how I use it.

My original use for DTP was just collecting and organizing PDF documents I had--whether articles, books, news clippings, whatever. Overtime, it's gone beyond PDFs to include word processing documents, epubs, and more--basically any written content. I created large umbrella categories such as "books," "articles," and "file cabinet" with the last category for more miscellaneous content. I organize under the big categories with smaller, more precise topical categories. I've changed the file name of books and titles to be organized by author's last name.

When I was working on my (never-completed) dissertation, I had a separate database just for that content.

As articles tend to collect on my desktop or in my downloads folder, I routinely sweep them into the DTP Inbox folder in Finder or drag them to the DTP icon that you can put on your desktop. Then, every so often, I organize them in DTP from the inbox folder in the app to wherever they should go in the organizational structure.

Speaking of which, DTP allows you to create aliases in other folders. So, if you have an article that could be categorized in more than one folder, you can place it in all applicable places without duplicating the actual file. Good use can be made for tags and such, too.

DTP comes with ABBYY Finereader which will allow you to OCR documents if they're just straight scans. I've been able to use this to OCR text that had been ignored by Adobe Acrobat.

I've tried using DTP as a note-taking app like you would use Apple Notes or Evernote for, but I've not really found it the best solution for that. However, I know of lots of folks who do that to great success.

A few years ago, I tried dropping in over 100,000 emails but it bogged down the software too much, so I removed them. That was probably ten years ago, though. I've not tried that on something like my M2 MacBook Pro which may have the power to handle that much content just fine.

DPT is among my "four horsemen" of professional applications along with Mellel, Bookends, and (of course) Logos. It's those first three that would keep me from ever switching away from Apple platforms. Speaking of which, you can get an iOS/iPadOS DTP app to sync your database(s) from your Mac to mobile devices. This was extremely clunky originally, but works quite well now.

I hope it works well for you. And if you find any good resources for using DTP, please let me (us) know!

Chas

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1299117#Comment_1299117

Thank you, Rick. That's just the sort of info I was looking for. I'm glad you included the warning about adding e-mail to a DTP database. As a trial, I had thought about shoving a year's worth of e-mail in and seeing how well DTP's classification tools help to bring some order to it. But I may hold off on that.

Meanwhile, I'm already seeing how well it works for clips and PDFs created and exported via Logos. I haven't yet had much success getting it to search for Greek words across my research database, though I finally realized I had to add Greek as a language recognized by the OCR component. I have some PDFs exported from Logos, and it would be handy if they were searchable by DTP. Now that I've tweaked the OCR settings, maybe it needs some time alone to think. Or maybe there's something I'm overlooking.

Chas

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1299117#Comment_1299117

Chas

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1299117#Comment_1299117

Chas

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1299117#Comment_1299117

Thank you, Rick. That's just the sort of info I was looking for. I'm glad you included the warning about adding e-mail to a DTP database. As a trial, I had thought about shoving in a year's worth of e-mail in DTP and seeing how well DTP's classification tools help to bring some order to it. But I may hold off on that, at least for now.

Meanwhile, I'm already seeing how well it works for organizing clips and PDFs created and exported via Logos. I haven't yet had much success getting DTP to search for Greek words across my research database, though I finally realized I probably had to add Greek as a language recognized by the OCR component. I have some PDFs exported from Logos, and it would be handy if they were searchable by DTP. Now that I've tweaked the OCR settings, maybe it needs some time alone to think. Or maybe there's something I'm overlooking.

Thanks again.

Chas

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1299117#Comment_1299117

Donovan R. Palmer

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1299117#Comment_1299117

What Rick said. I have been using DTP for almost 20 years now. It is one of the apps that will always keep me on MacOS. I cannot emphasize enough how important this piece of software is to me. It has years and years of research in it

To get an idea of where it fits, here is my personal knowledge management ecosystem... though a few small bits are now out of date. To export clippings and notes from Logos, I save them as RTF format and then when in DTP I convert them to Markdown. There are some threads on here and some feedback posts requesting that Logos sets up a way to sync your highlights in Readwise, but for now you have to do it manually.

Chas

Thank you very much, Rick and Donovan. That's exactly the kind of info I was hoping to read. I've already been impressed with how easy it is to bring PDFs, clips and quotes and such from Logos into DTP. Logos's export to PDF is what I'm using, and then using Services / Add to DEVONthink3 to get stuff into my inbox. And it's defaulting to my Exegesis database location at present, which is fine, though it's asking for confirmation, which is also fine.

And I managed to get it to search across my databases on Greek words, which is nice. On that basis alone, I can see that a license will be worth the investment, though I'll probably wait until SummerFest2024 in hopes of getting a discount. We'll see.

Rick, thanks for the warning about e-mail. I had thought about dumping a year's worth of e-mail messages into DTP and seeing how its classification algorithm (trying to use that word at least once a day, right?) handles it. But I think now I'll wait on that. I don't really want to gunk up the engine too much at this stage.

Donovan, that was an elegant chart showing your workflow and data organization scheme. Sometime I'll ask what Obsidian's role is.

Donovan R. Palmer

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1299149#Comment_1299149

Obsidian is my markdown editor. I index Obsidian's vault in Devonthink, so that my notes show up alongside all my archives. You can use DevonThink for notetaking, but I prefer Obsidian for this. Because I am writing in Markdown, my notes are portable to any software that reads and writes Markdown.

Chas

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1299176#Comment_1299176

@Donovan: I'm just now getting familiar with Obsidian, which I'm hoping to use alongside DEVONthink. WIth your notes in Obsidian, have you set up a traditional parent-child folder system, perhaps with some interlinks, or are you keeping all your notes in a "flat" space and relying on tags and links to associate related items and to search?

I'm actually setting up my Obsidian system for exegetical notes this weekend, so I'd be interested in your thoughts. As I'm looking a lot at intertextuality, it makes sense to incorporate a lot of links, but I'm tempted to do without parent-child folders all together. I welcome your thoughts.