DEVONtechnologies did not develop the rich and plain text editors. They are code provided by Apple in OS X. They don’t do autosave automatically.
When I’m editing a draft I’ve written in rich text within DEVONthink, I find the “two instances” behavior useful. I edit the document that’s open in its own window. I may experiment with it by rephrasing a point, and I can compare the edit with the previous version shown in a pane of the Three Panes view. If I like the edit change, I can Save it in the open window. If I don’t like my edit changes, I can close the window without saving it, and the original is preserved.
Over the years, I’ve lost work even in apps that do autosave, such as Word, because a glitch had occurred (most of us couldn’t afford totally fault-tolerant computers, even if they were available). I adopted the habit of periodically pressing Command-S during editing, when I’m satisfied with what I’ve written. Small effort, with an occasionally very large payoff.
Obviously, we don’t have the same way working. For me, in the rare cases where i would like to have two instances in order to compare them, i would create a copy of the 1st document.
This is not much work compared to the work that i lost (and i loose) because of the described behavior that stays for me more a bug than a feature.
Anyway, back to the core of the double-click-topic: i tried again to find some advantages working with the internal PDF-Editor. I believe that i could be very useful, especially when working with the internal links, but for me, this is only possible if the double click opens the PDF in a window that is : size at least half of the screen, and zoomed a little bit more. When i open a PDF on my 15" Screen with DTPOs viewer, i cannot read anything when the windows open .
I have manually to resize the window and click at least two times on the “Zoom +” in order to have something similar than the Size and the Zoomlevel of Apples “Preview”. This is not confortable when i am quickly browsing lot of documents. (I guess DTPO developers are exclusively working on 21" screens?")
Is there a way to ask DTPO to open the PDF in a window with similar size and zoom level as Apple Preview does?
Yes please! I dislike the DT PDF viewer for this very reason. I hardly do any editing in DT, the majority of the time I open a PDF is because the preview pane view is too small. With Finder’s preview I can double-click the title bar and it zooms in nicely. Not so in DT’s viewer.
If I want to edit PDFs, it’s Open with > PDFpen, but that’s just my preferred app for PDF editing & annotation (lately being surpassed by DTTG2 + Apple Pencil).
Yes, that was the best tip from this conversation. It’s what I now use for viewing PDFs.
But DT’s PDF viewer does have some advantages, hence my vote to make it less clunky.
PDFpen is still my editing/annotating tool of choice… for now.
I know this is an old thread, so my apologies if I’m pointing out something that’s been known for a long while, but I just stumbled onto this thread. I agree that default opening with built-in apps is not ideal. However, you do know you can just cmd-shift-O to open with default external app right? That makes it kind of irrelevant which way it open when you double-click. The keyboard is quicker anyway.
