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DEVONthink Personal supports a variety of text and image formats, including plain text, Rich Text Format (RTF), PDFs, all image formats supported by by Mac OS X and QuickTime as well as all file formats for which a Quick Look preview is available.


Text files

DEVONthink Personal supports plain text files (as well as Mac OS 9 SimpleText and Tex-Edit Plus files) in all encodings supported by Mac OS X, including Unicode and UTF-8. By default, DEVONthink Personal automatically recognizes the encoding and the line endings used by Mac, Windows, or Unix operating systems.

  • Extensions: adb, ads, aln, ans, applescript, bat, bib, bibtex, c, cls, cmd, command, con, cp, cpp, crash, css, csv, dot, em, embl, erl, err, f, f70, f90, fasta, for, fpp, gb, genbank, gff, h, hlp, hpp, hs, hrl, id2xf, inc, js, lhs, lisp, log, lst, m, markdown, mdwn, mi, mis, ml, mly, mm, mmi, mml, msf, p, pas, pir, pl, pp, py, rb, rc, scm, scpt, scptd, scriptSuite, scriptTerminology, sdef, seq, sh, sqc, sql, ss, strings, sty, sw, swiss, tab, tcl, tex, text, textile, txt, v, vcf, wrl, x, xchatlog, xd
  • HFS type codes: TEXT, ttro, TERO, sEXT, SimpleText, scpt, osas, APPL (AppleScripts wrapped in an executable application)
  • Automatic recognition: DEVONthink Personal also recognizes plain text file formats defined by third-party applications.

Rich Text Format: For Rich Text Format (RTF) files, DEVONthink Personal recognizes Mac, Windows, and ANSI encodings as well as Mac OS X RTF documents with attachments (RTFD).

  • Extensions: rtf, rtfd
  • HFS type codes: RTF


Office and other documents

DEVONthink Personal imports many Office file formats such as Microsoft Office and OpenDocument documents as well as all other file formats for which Quick Look support is available, e.g. Mellel (version 2.6 and higher) files, AppleScript scripts or text clippings.

Note: Quick Look is Mac OS X 10.5's mechanism for displaying a preview of almost any file type. In the Finder this function is invoked by pressing the Space bar. Quick Look requires the maker of the software that writes the document to add additional preview information inside the file (package) or to provide a Quick Look plugin embedded into the application itself or installed in a Library folder. If neither DEVONthink Personal nor the Finder can preview a document format that you want to use, please contact the maker of the software and ask it to provide Quick Look support for its file format.

Due to the nature of Quick Look, the contents of a document that is displayed using this technology, e.g., an Apple Pages file, is sometimes not selectable. Depending on the file format, for some files a plain or rich text alternative is available, e.g., for email messages. Where available use the Text View/Preview toggle button in the document's navigation bar to switch back and forth between plain text and preview modes.

Additional Quick Look plugins can be found e.g. on QLPlugins.com.


Chat logs

DEVONthink Personal understands the text format of logs generated by iChat or Yahoo Messenger. You can import them like rich text files.

  • Extensions: chat, ichat
  • HFS type codes: YMSG


PDF, PostScript, Skim

DEVONthink Personal imports and displays Portable Document Format (PDF) files, Skim PDF packages, and PostScript files. DEVONthink Personal extracts the readable text portions of the PDF making it possible to search the text of the PDF and to use See Also & Classify. PostScript files are converted to PDF on-the-fly.

It is possible to manually convert imported PDFs to plain text or RTF by using Data > Convert.

Note: It's not yet possible to extract text from protected PDF files. Protected PDFs are imported as simple images. You can correctly view the PDF in DEVONthink Personal, though, after entering the correct password.


Bookmarks

Drag or paste Internet addresses from any Internet application, or Internet location files from the Finder, to DEVONthink Personal to create a bookmark documents. DEVONthink Personal is especially optimized to accept Safari Bookmarks. Use bookmarks in DEVONthink Personal to integrate 'live' content from the Internet seamlessly with local documents.

  • Extensions: dtLink, ftploc, fileloc, inetloc, mailloc, newsloc, url, vncloc, webloc
  • HFS type codes: ilht, ilft, ilfi, ilma, ilnw, ilaf, ilat, ilns, ilge, ilvn, LINK


HTML and XML

In addition to the text encodings already listed, DEVONthink Personal supports the standard HTML transcriptions for special characters (for example German umlauts and French accents). HTML can also be converted to plain text using Data > Convert. XML files of any kind can also be imported and are displayed with syntax coloring. Preference property lists of Mac OS X 10.4 and higher are stored in a binary format and are converted on-the-fly to readable XML.

Also, DEVONthink Personal supports Web archives containing HTML pages including all necessary images for displaying them offline.

  • Extensions: asp, aspx, cgi, cfm, dtd, ent, htm, html, idata, jhtml, jsp, mhtml, ompl, ooutline, php, php3, php4, phtml, plist, rdf, rsd, rss, sdef, sgm, sgml, shtm, shtml, wml, xbl, xhtm, xhtml, xml, xmloutline, xsl, xslt, webarchive
  • Automatic recognition: DEVONthink Personal also recognizes HTML and XML file formats defined by third-party applications.


Image Files

DEVONthink Personal imports all image formats supported by Mac OS X and QuickTime.

  • Extensions: bmp, cur, eps, fax, fpix, fpx, gif, icns, ico, jpeg, jpg, mac, pct, pdf, pict, png, pnt, pntg, psd, qti, qtif, rgb, sgi, targa, tga, tif, tiff; Mac OS X 10.4 or QuickTime 7 only: jp2, dng, exr, raw
  • HFS type codes: 8BPS, BMPf, EPSF, FPix, GIFf, 'ICO ', JPEG, 'PDF ', PICT, PNGf, PNTG, 'SGI ', TIFF, TPIC, qtif

Installed applications or services can add support for other file formats to Mac OS X and therefore to DEVONthink Personal as well.

Note: PICT files can still be imported but Mac OS X 10.5 does no longer display them.


Multimedia Files

DEVONthink Personal displays or plays QuickTime movies, sounds, Flash movies and Shockwave animations. To add movies, sounds, or MP3s to DEVONthink Personal, import them like any other file to your database. Multimedia files can also be dragged into a rich text document to integrate them with text and images.

  • Extensions: 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, 3gpp, aac, adts, aif, AIF, aifc, AIFC, AIFF, aiff, amc, amr, atr, AU, au, avi, bwf, caf, cdda, cel, dif, dv, dvd, flc, fli, gsm, kar, m15, m1a, m1s, m1v, m2a, m2v, m3u, m4a, m4b, m4p, m4v, m75, mid, midi, mov, MOV, mp2, mp3, MP3, mp4, mpa, mpeg, mpg, mpm, mpv, mqv, MQV, pls, qht, qhtm, qt, qtpf, qtz, rtsp, sd2, sdp, sdv, skin, smf, smi, smil, sml, SND, snd, swa, swf, ulw, ULW, vfw, wav, WAV
  • HFS type codes: .SMI, .WAV, 3gp2, 3gpp, adts, AIFC, AIFF, ALAW, 'amc ', 'amr ', attr, caff, cdda, DAVI, DIVX, dvc!, embd, 'FLI ', grip, 'GSM ', hmov, 'M1A ', 'M1V ', Midi, MooV, 'Mp3 ', 'MP3 ', MPEG, 'MPG ', MPG2, MPG3, mpg4, MPGa, MPGA, MPGv, MPGV, MPGx, mxfd, PLAY, qhtm, rtsp, Sd2f, 'sdp ', 'sdv ', SMIL, SwaT, SWFL, ULAW, 'VfW ', WAVE

DEVONthink Personal also supports QuickTime file types provided by third-party components.

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