Beside from that I am almost certain I will keep the newspapers as ePubs and not PDF, and that’s why:
While the old .pobi/mobi files have to get converted somehow, the present day newspapers are ePub already and will not require any conversions.
PDF, unlike ePub, allows annotations, true. But it does not make any sense to annotate directly in a newspaper:
The newspaper database will only be open when I want to do a dedicated search in it. If it was always open the newspapers with their wide array of subjects would obfuscate my search results. If it is closed the annotations in it would not be available.
Unless I copied them to my working database, of course. But that does not make any sense, because I would not quote something like “As The Guardian said in it’s new year’s eve 2013 issue…”. What I will quote is “Author, Article Title, in: The Guardian (ePub/Kindle issue), 31.12.2013”.
The PDF has pages, but these are pages generated by me and therefore it would be absolutely useless to add them to the source when I quote from it.
What does make a lot of sense on the other hand is to only convert articles I find useful to PDFs and move them into my working database. This wouldn’t be any different to what I had been doing as long as Amazon sold newspapers for the Kindle—the .pobi format allowed to save single articles on the Kindle (in plain text). At that point in the workflow I will get all the PDF benefits like annotations, having a platform and software independent format, etc.
And then there is another thing that pushes me to ePub: In Best Alternative, i. e. rendered view, DT displays only one article at a time. While the PDF is one big document. With an ePub a simple cmd-a (or a script) would highlight the whole article I want while in a PDF this has to be done manually.
I started playing with different conversion options in DEVONthink. At first I thought I would go for Copy → Markdown → PDF. Because the intermediary Markdown would allow me to strip defunct links to “Previous arcticle”, “Category overview” from the top of the article and the corresponding ones at the bottom. I could also add the source, the newspaper issue, somewhere.
But although all newspapers have these kind of links, they all handle them differently and it would be difficult to have them removed by script. Plus, the Markdown files are not always good looking. One newspaper even has subheadings that say “Subheading starts here” and “Subheading ends here” with the actual text of the subheadings in between them!
Printing from the rendered ePub articles mostly looks very fine. The old Kindle files don’t look that good—yet. This is due to the conversion in Calibre I will have to optimize.
And then there is a feature of DEVONthink I had not used before—the imprinter. I will use it to put the source directly on the article PDF so I have a simple way of quoting properly in other apps like Scrivener.
I have not yet decided about the format of my source metadata. Just text or item link? And I want a script that does all in one: Print the item from the active editor window to PDF, imprint its source on it, move the PDF into the Global Inbox.
Sounds like a plan.