Bookmark or tag a specific page or text or section within a document?

Is there a way to bookmark specific pages in a pdf document? Or perhaps, is there a way to perhaps tag content in a pdf (or something along these lines)?

SCENARIO:

  • In a physical library I can review scores of physical books & resources, place a post-it note in the exact location of the relevant info I find. Hours later, I can easily sift through the piles and organize what I found. The exact location is bookmarked. Later on, there is no need to leaf through entire docs, speeding up the summary process.

  • In DT often I work with documents that are hundreds of pages long. Rather than tagging entire documents (which is also useful), I’d like to find a way a way to bookmark or tag specific pages or places within those documents.

I’d then have the ability to quickly sift through hundreds of documents, perhaps thousands of pages, quickly marking exact locations of relevant data. Later as I summarize findings, I’d be able to directly locate info without needing to scroll through entire documents a second time.

I imagine a simple bookmark feature within docs would accomplish this goal? Or, is there a way to add tags within docs?

I’m open to creative solutions.

Annotations are your best friend here. Open your PDF in DT, and choose the second tab in the Inspector on the right. From the drop-down menu next to Annotations, choose New from Template… and select a format, which will create an rtf or Markdown document to hold all your references for that PDF. Now you can use the Insert Back Link or (with text selected) Insert Quote options from the same menu to bookmark specific pages, with or without text.

At the moment DT doesn’t do deep links in PDFs (to specific passages), so the bookmarked references will simply link to the page, but it’s a very powerful tool, particularly when used in combination with Markdown transclusion to keep track of bookmarks in multiple PDFs in a single master index.

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Here’s a sample link
x-devonthink-item://ECA05BF2-5E44-44F3-9ADF-7BBBA5009DCE?page=0

Screen Shot 2023-01-09 at 12.28.48

@NickLowe and @DTLow are on the right track here.

Both annotations files and page links allow for creating bookmarks to pages in PDFs.