I have an idea / suggestion for discussion: what do you think if we could, say, select the pages we want to explicitly enable for the chat context…?
I know that currently, chat is getting the context on selection (that is, either a document is selected, or there is a selection of a text within that document…). But what if we could actively select pages in a pdf document (as an example) for the chat’s context…?
the workflow could be:
either in chat window, have button “select context” which would allow select pages in the open document. OR right click on a page in the open document, we could click “add to the chat’s context”
I don’t know if the other have this use case, but I often work with big pdf documents / books, and need to perform chat (“AI”) tasks on the specific pages (either for summary, or as a reference or reformatting etc). and this would help a lot!
You could split the documents (see commands in Tools menu). Alternatively you could select the pages in the Thumbnails inspector, copy them and press Cmd-N to create a new document with these pages and then use this document as the context.
My use case is that sometimes I come across an interesting chapter — from a nonfiction book, technical documentation, a recipe, etc. — and my goal is to create a summary in a specific format using Chat in DT.
In that scenario, splitting the document or copying selected pages would mean creating an extraintermediate document that I have no real use for once the summary is generated and properly stored/formatted.
That’s why I suggested an option to “send” specific content — in my case, specific PDF pages from a document — directly to the chat as input/context
feels like two different lifecycles getting collapsed into one. the pages you want to feed the chat are ephemeral, a scratch selection for a single answer, but every current path forces them into a durable document you then have to clean up afterwards. that mismatch is the whole friction.
one thing worth adding: for a big book, feeding fewer denser pages usually beats feeding the whole thing. the answer gets sharper when the context is the relevant chapter, not the volume around it, so a manual page-range selection is doing real work, not just saving clicks.
if a “send these pages to chat” scratch mode ever lands, the trick is that it never becomes a stored item, otherwise you are right back to the cleanup problem.
