@kderbyshire, if I understand your first step correctly, you have:
- PDFs of research articles imported into DEVONthink
- notes on these articles as note records in DEVONthink
These PDFs and note records in DEVONthink represent your source of truth and you want to bring the notes over to Tinderbox in order to further work with your notes (analyse, filter/group by topic, arrange on a map, etc). Important metadata from your DEVONthink notes (like their tags) should also get transferred over to Tinderbox.
In addition, when changing a note’s tags or other metadata in DEVONthink, the corresponding note in Tinderbox should get updated and reflect these changes.
If that is what you would like to achieve, I’ve written two scripts that will do exactly that(*):
If your DEVONthink notes originally stem from annotations stored inside your PDF(s), you could use my DEVONthink Notes from PDF Annotations script to extract your annotations as DEVONthink notes. The script will transfer the annotation’s highlight color and can also transfer metadata such as a flag, rating, tags or custom metadata, and it can automatically fetch the article’s bibliographic metadata and create a deep link that points back to the PDF annotation.
In order to then export your DEVONthink notes to Tinderbox, select all of them (or simply select their hosting group(s)) and run my Exporting notes from DEVONthink to Tinderbox script. This will create corresponding Tinderbox notes for each of your DEVONthink notes. For each DEVONthink note, the script will also transfer its tags, flag, rating, color & label as well as many custom metadata, it can create Tinderbox links from Wiki links, and create deep links that directly point back to the DEVONthink record & PDF annotation.
If you change your note(s) in DEVONthink, simply select them and run the script again. This will update the corresponding Tinderbox notes so that they reflect the changes you’ve made to your notes in DEVONthink.
(*) That said, note that changing the note’s title will currently create a new note in Tinderbox (and not update the existing one) as the note’s path (which includes its title) is used to identify the note in Tinderbox. A future version of the script could use the DEVONthink note’s ID to lookup the note in Tinderbox which would allow to also change the note’s title.