I won’t comment on the developers’ plans.
But I achieve the objective of deep linking – opening a desired document at a specific location – with the tools already available in DEVONthink.
And I’ve been “linking” not only to a specific document location in another rich text document, but to specific locations in PDF and HTML/WebArchive documents.
The “link” in my rich text note is a “cue” text string, usually 3 to 5 words, copied from the desired location in the target document. It’s pretty easy to choose a text string that has a high probability of being unique to that location, even in a PDF with hundreds of pages.
Now in my rich text note I can select that cue string and press Command-/, the Lookup command. DEVONthink’s Search window will open with the cue string already entered. I’ll set the search to Exact Phrase and hit Return. I click on the desired document in the result list, and the document opens and scrolls to the first occurrence of the cue string. Almost always, that will be the location I want to “jump” to; if not, click in the text pane and press Command-G to scroll to the next occurrence.
This is the technique I use to associate my notes and drafts to references in my database.
Even if “deep links” between rich text documents appears in a future version of DEVONthink, I’ll continue to use this technique, because it has some advantages:
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It lets me jump to a desired document and location in PDF, HTML and WebArchive references as well as text references.
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Because each Lookup Search window is newly created and previous Lookup windows are persistent until closed, I can have multiple “windows” open in the same document, each referring to the location of a different cue string.
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I don’t lose my place in my note or draft document from which I originated the Lookup, and I don’t need to create a link back to the referring note. I use Exposé to move among my open document and view windows.
Comment: This method of associating my rich text notes and drafts to material in my database works so well for me that I prefer it to Skim, for example, to make notes about PDF documents. Skim’s notes are plain text, so I can’t include images or hyperlinks. Skim’s notes are not indexed and are not searchable in my database, but my rich text notes are searchable. As I often extend my note documents into draft sections of a writing project, my rich text notes associated with a PDF fit that workflow much better than Skim’s plain text notes.
I’m not arguing against improvements to DEVONthink. But the existing tools are rich and flexible enough to quickly and easily do things such as associating notes to specific locations in other documents, that might at first glance look impossible.
I always like to point out workarounds and kludges, especially ones that are really quite effective and efficient.