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.