It’s not showing up for me. But I think that is because I use Dropbox to sync and not iCloud. I’m old school and have been gunshy to trust iCloud, so given the option I will always choose Dropbox.
I tried navigating to my Dropbox folder from within PDF Expert, but that leads me to a DEVONthink Packet Sync folder that I am rather scared to mess with. Everything has very cryptic names with .receipt at the end of it and I don’t think I’m supposed to poke around in there much.
I did add iCloud to my sync options in DevonThink on the Mac. So now both Dropbox and iCloud are syncing. I hate to have double the copies of my documents, but I need to find a way to annotate without having copies of pdfs everywhere — that’s the mess I’m trying to avoid by using Devonthink. So far, it’s still not showing up in iCloud on my iPad, but that might take a while.
I have the same problem with any pdf in Devon. Some of them were created on my Mac, some were done on iOS. Regardless of where the pdf originated from, the end result is the same.
DEVONThink will work as a file provider regardless of your sync method on iOS! No need to use two sync methods to get access to your documents the way I described.
You may need to enable DEVONThink in the Files App. Once in the Files App, click on Edit at the top right. You should have the option of enabling DEVONThink to Go as a file provider.
Yes. I can see my devonthink files from the Files app on iOS. But when I go to the PDF expert app they’re not showing up there. It seems like the only thing I can do from the files app is send a copy to PDF Expert or use apple’s built-in markup there. Those markups will save back to devonthink, but I’d rather not use the files app as my annotation app of choice.
Stephen,
You have been a world of help, thanks! You solved one of my few pain points with DT. All of my databases in DT show up in the Files app and I can access the same databases from PDF Expert. I owe you one!
I don’t have a yellowish iCloud Drive icon. Here is what my copy of PDF Expert looks like. I even upgraded my PDF Expert for $10 so I could edit documents in case that was the problem, but it didn’t fix it.
On the iPhone it is yellow ish. On the iPad it is different. Click on the pic of the cloud with the word iCloud Drive next to it. Once you do that you are in the file dialog. Keep clicking in the upper left to go back until you see the Locations. Once at locations you can see all your file providers. Click edit if you don’t see DEVONThink.
Wow! It worked! Thank you so much for your patience with me until I got that figured out. I was able to highlight a pdf and those highlights were visible in DEVONthink. Awesome. My new problem is PDF Expert is acting very weird. I can’t seem to delete highlights and it was even hanging and not letting me re-open files. But that is a different problem. I hope DEVONthink fixes their annotation so we don’t have to do these work-arounds, but in the meantime, I’m very grateful to know this.
Now— is there any way to get my DEVON folder to stay in the sidebar of PDF Expert? That’s a lot of clicking over and over. I’ve added my DEVONthink folder to my favorites, but still I don’t see a way to get it to show up in the sidebar. There is a lot of real estate on the sidebar I would like to take advantage of.
Over on this thread@Scottisloud recommended PDF Viewer. That seems to be a quick and dirty way to do the same thing. I can open my DEVONthink PDFs in place without copying them, mark them up and those markups are visible within DEVONthink. I was running into sluggish performance on PDF expert and this is a nice alternative. Thanks Scott!
These two discussions on DTTG and PDF annotating have been very helpful.
The issue I have now is that I can access/download the documents within DTTG, but not through the iOS 11 files app/document picker. All the documents are greyed out in the files app.
Is that because the files need to be downloaded to my iPad prior to accessing them in the files app? My current setting in DTTG is to download the files “On Demand” rather than “Always”.
I’m using a Webdav file location. Not sure if that’s relevant or not.
That is strange behaviour, and not something I had noticed until you mentioned it.
I tried to recreate it by doing what you did on my iPhone, and could then see the issue.
But simply rotating the device into landscape mode, left ample ‘space’ to the left and right of the content, meaning that the option to move the toolbar left or right, solved the problem.
Have you tried that? Will give it a go on my iPad when I have a moment as well, but thinking it would do the same.
I have found Files.app to be a bit unstable, and needing to reload it a few times, and wait, before waiting to properly access my DTTG2 files.
That said, whereas most of my data is available on device, I too see items ‘not downloaded’ as being ‘greyed-out’. I guess that would make sense, since the file is not ‘in’ DTTG2, so to speak?
Yes. This has been a very helpful thread! Thank you to all! What started this thread was my text annotation tools were on top of my pdf and I couldn’t read the pdf. I discovered something interesting. After I downloaded PDF Viewer, the problem with DEVONthink to go’s annotation toolbar seems to have gone away! I can now resize the text so it gets out of the way of the toolbar. I don’t know if downloading PDF Viewer was the fix (that doesn’t seem possible), but they do use the same editing engine and my problem seems to have gone away. Weird. But cool.
Glad you are liking PDF Viewer! I was a bit late to the party because I was so committed to PDF Expert, but once I switched my PDF library to DEVONthink (and iCloud Drive) I found PDF Expert to be a bit cumbersome. PDF Viewer gets you to your files with minimal friction. PDF Expert requires a boatload of tapping, so I really only use it from time to time these days if there’s something it does or does more easily compared to PDF Viewer (though honestly there are few features in PDF Expert that PDF Viewer doesn’t also do!)
