The DEVONtechnologies Blog
How to Use Annotations in DEVONthink 4
If you want to take notes about a document in your DEVONthink database, there is a feature that does exactly that: the annotation. This is a specialized note document linked to another document. It is most often used for taking long-form notes about PDFs, but can be used with any document in your database. We already introduced them in a blog post some time ago. However, here is a short recap of how to create them, as well as some additions to the previous post.
Select a document in your database. To create an annotation, select Data > Annotate & Remind and choose one of the default templates. Alternatively, open the Tools > Inspectors > Info: Annotations & Reminders inspector, click the Annotations button and choose from the New from Template menu. Or just start typing in the annotation field and the document is created for you.
Above the annotation field are buttons to open the annotation in its own window (the arrow), create a backlink to the document you’re writing about (the chain), or insert a quote from selected text (the quote). In the Annotations menu, you will find similar commands but also some new AI-related ones:
- Insert Summary via Chat: The selected chat model summarizes the current document or its selected text. Click insert to add in the summary into the annotation.
- Insert Transcription: Inserts recognized text from an image or speech from a media document, as explained in this blog post about AI speech transcription.
You can find more information on all annotation commands in the Inspectors > Info pane > Annotations & Reminders > Annotation Files section in the built-in Help or user handbook.
Lastly, you can configure some default settings for the annotations in Settings > Files > General:
- Choose whether to create annotation documents in the same group as your document or in a shared Annotations group at the root of this database.
- Choose whether annotations should “follow” the originating document if it is moved to another database.
- Choose whether the annotation document’s name should be updated if you rename the originating document. If the annotation has a backlink to the original document, you must also enable the WikiLinks > Update name of item links automatically setting to change the link’s text.
- The annotation document can be either Markdown or rich text. Choose one of these options or let DEVONthink decide based on the originating document’s type.