[feature request] Remember page, when reading PDF

I have a lot of PDFs which I read. I’m brand new to DevonThink and still learning what it does and what the best appliances are to make use of it.

When I double click a PDF I find my self in the PDF-reader. That’s nice. But when I exit that view and then double click the PDF again, I’m always back to the starting page. This is not very helpful if you try to read a long PDF or actually work with PDFs. If you leave a PDF, chances are you may want to pick up at that place. I think this applies much more often than wanting the start page.

Is there any way I can tell devonthink to remember the page I am one when I close the PDF-reader?

Does nobody know?

I’ve noticed the behavior is erratic - sometimes it re-opens the PDF viewer window on the last page viewed, sometimes the first page, sometimes the page at the bottom of the sidebar, sometimes at the next-to-last page. Bug?

Hey korm,

thanks for your reply and interesting find. I couldn’t trace a pattern so far just noticed the first page behavior and found that not to be smart.

So maybe tag this “bug report” instead of “feature request”. If anybody of the devs reading this? How do we notify them?

Your posting will get read.

OK, next step: provide a fix :slight_smile:

I have also requested this feature because … well… I don’t know how to explain in any other words, but reading pdfs in dtpro is practically useless because of this and also the lack of a default zoom level when reading pdfs. Without a default zoom level then when I zoom up a document or pdf using ⇧ ⌘ + then switch to another doc and back to the original, the zoom settings are lost. So, not only is there no default zoom but the zoom levels don’t stay.

Maybe this is little off your topic but…let me know what U think…

Your suggestion has a lot to do with this. Saving the exact view of a PDF is the way to go, if that technically is possible.

If a user has a certain view there are reasons for that choice. In 90% of all cases I think users would like to return to exact the same view they left.

Is there any PDF viewer that does this? mac Preview, Skim and Adobe Acrobat Pro don’t. Not sure why. This must be a much wanted feature.

EDIT: PDFpenPro (99€) does save the zoom level. Don’t ask me why skim does not. Here’s the feature request for Skim (please add your vote if you agree this feature would be smart to have): sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=d … tid=941984

any official reply to this request / existing bug?

one month later, still no response - not cool. can this feature be added?

This isn’t a new request. There have been a number of forum requests of a similar nature, to some of which Christian has replied.

Personally, I would also like PDFs to remember the last location at which they were open.

But I would be far happier if such a feature wasn’t limited to PDFs, but applied to documents of other filetypes as well, including plain or rich text, HTML, WebArchive, and Sheets. In my own databases, I’ve got more long documents in those other filetypes than I do in PDF. The issue of returning to the last position read in a document is by no means limited to PDFs.

For example, one of my interests is the history of science, especially phlogistic chemistry chemistry and evolutionary theory. Thanks to Project Gutenberg and other sources, there!s a wealth of information on such topics, most of it in text formats. Digital books are freely available, so that I can easily capture seminal works in the history of science. But reading book-length works in text format presents the same issue as if I were reading them in PDF: How. far had I gotten, when I last closed the document?

An overriding principle of DEVONthink is that the documents in a database are maintained in their native file formats and are not modified by the fact of being captured into a database. And DEVONthink uses the available display and rendering available in OS X and filetype plugins, rather than writing its own code to render and display documents.

In order to identify a “last-read location” property for at least the filetypes mentioned above, it may be possible to designate a new metadata property in DEVONthink that would be automatically written when documents are closed. I haven’t talked to Christian about this, but suspect he would favor a more general solution to this issue, rather than one that’s filetype specific.

I’m a fan of kludges that I can devise to let me do something that isn’t yet directly possible.

My kludge to open a long document at the last position reached when last opened is via creating an Annotation rich text note (Data > New with Template > Annotation. If I’m going to go to the trouble of reading a long article or book, I’m probably going to make notes about it, anyway. When I’ve reached a stopping point, I can make an entry in the Annotation note that will let me resume reading at that point.

For the filetypes mentioned above, I could select a string of words that’s probably unique to that location, copy the string to the clipboard and paste it into the Annotation note, then enclose the string within quotation marks. When I want to resume reading the annotated document, I would first open the Annotation note, then select the “location clue” text string (including the quotation marks) and invoke the Lookup Service by pressing ‘Command-L’. The Search window will open with that string already entered. Press ‘Return’, select the annotated document in the results list, and it will open in the Search window and scroll to the first occurrence of the “location clue” string. I can resume reading, perhaps in Full Screen.

For PDFs only, I could instead copy/paste the Page Link of the page where I had stopped reading, into the Annotation note. In this case, to resume reading at that page, I would first open the Annotation note in its own window, then Control-click on the Page Link and choose the option to open the PDF in a new tab - very convenient to continue making notes as I read.

yes~ it’s been a while since I also asked about this ~

please provide the ability to remember pages numbers for pdfs (or any file) and also size. it is extremely frustrating and also renders dt pro useless when handling pdfs if the size and page numbers revert back to p. 1 super small print each time I change from one file and back to the other.

What is the developer thinking about this? Is this on his radar/ticket system?

Imo, basic functionality for a document manager. PDFs are and will become even more important. The way those files are dealt with will be key to determine how good a file manager / PDF viewer is.

And again, if the internal PDF-viewer fails it should be allowed to set a third party software as default viewer for PDFs.

Whatever the dev wants. But providing a bad PDF viewer and not allowing direct opening with third party software is not cool - at all.