Is there any way to have a “sticky” or “persistent” read status that doesn’t automatically switch from unread to read the moment I simply click on a PDF and display it in the right panel? I have a number of articles, books, etc whose ‘read’ status I would like to track, but because all documents automatically get flagged as ‘read’ after a simple click I’m considering creating two ‘status: Read’ and ‘status: Unread’ tags and manually tracking read/unread status.
Is there a way to disable the automatically-mark-as-read when viewed behaviour?
It’s not possible to keep “unread” status locked on. The behavior of DT’s read/unread status indicator is consistent with Mail and other Mac apps.
However, you can use the flagged/unflagged status, or labels, or tags (e.g., “Read Me”) to get the same tracking result you mentioned. These things are persistent, and can be found by SmartGroups.
Cool - thanks for the quick reply. So I’m on the right track with custom “status” tags. Which raises another question: Is it possible to make a document that has a certain tag (like “status: Readme” or something) appear bold and/or affect the unread counter (that appears in brackets behind folder names)? I don’t know much about Apple Scripts but can it be used to make this happen?
Yes, possible with a script, but probably not reliable. You can have a script that gets triggered when a parent group is selected (see Triggered Scripts in the help file), but if you selected a document inside that group that was marked “unread” by your script, then DT would mark it “read” and your script wouldn’t know about that until the next time you select the parent group. This sounds messy.
I think the reliable method would be to have your script set tags and labels (colors). But, that’s not going to affect the unread count in the group name. If you want a reliable way to mark the documents on your reading list, and to see how many docs are on the list, use tags and/or lables, plus a SmartGroup that searches for those things. The SmartGroup will have a number that indicates how many items are in that SmartGroup. For example, I have this SmartGroup that looks for documents that I want to read and which have certain tags:
The automatically changing read status after quickly selecting a document is also a problem for me, as it makes this status totally unreliable and it is confusing to have some items shown in bold and some not.
In most e-mail-applications there is an option to turn this automatism off and
a) mark mails as read only by hand
b) or at least increase the time delay, an item has to be selected until marked as read automatically.
@Devon-Technologies Team:
would it be possible to add those 2 options to future versions (asap)?
IMHO the behavior of DTPro is absolutely confusing
This confusing and annoying issue was mentioned already several times during the last years, but unfortunately AFAIK never got any feedback from the developers, or am I mistaken?
