Sonny Software

I suspect this is significantly not as straightforward as it would at first seem, but I wondered if anyone had approached the challenge of synchronising labels (and better still, ratings) between Bookends and other applications, such as the Finder (or DEVONthink)?

I'd love to be able to glance in DEVONthink's index of my Bookends PDF library and see the labels and ratings I'd assigned them, as I find DEVON a much more comprehensive search system. I could partly achieve this using Hookmarks to connect records in Bookends with PDFs in DEVON, but this would shift my attention (and selection) in Bookends. I appreciate this is compounded by there not being a direct mapping between colour labels (and involving the Finder as middleware, with a different set of label mapping!) but could there be a mechanism inside Bookends to manage the mapping of such? (and have there been any prior attempts with Applescript or some other glue to handle this?)

I am not aware that labels or ratings will automatically synchronize outside Bookends. An AppleScript approach will likely have to push the label and the rating into user fields as a go-between transport mechanism.

Finder tags will synchronize across apps.

FWIW, I suggest that exporting the information that you want into a markdown file using a pre-defined format style will be a far easier approach to take compared to designing an AppleScript method. Check my posting on the Obsidian export format that I have developed. The format can easily be modified to include rating since this is a field that the format editor has available (as "r" in the field list).

Thanks for your insights there, @DrJJWMac

I'll poke around your existing work when my excess cognitive capacity returns. I suspected there wouldn't be a magic, works-perfectly solution for mapping that *looks* deceptively alike!