The new annotation template has one terrible feature - it blows away the URL of the item being annotated and replaces it with a link to the annotation. The “old” way (from this topic viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9434#p44150only placed the link in the URL field if that field was empty.
Once the URL is gone, I don’t think it is saved anywhere. While I like the link to the annotation, it would be better if the original URL were somehow preserved (perhaps in a field in the annotation?). Not sure if this is a bug or a feature request, but this is taken from a thread in the troubleshooting forum and posted here as well.
The original URL is saved, in the Spotlight Comments field. However, the URL is not saved as a link (I assume this is a limitation of the OS, not DT) and DT’s ‘Open URL’ contextual menu command is grayed out when the URL is selected. However, Safari’s Service Menu command ‘Open URL’ still works.
One possible solution would be to write the original document’s URL to the URL of the annotation document, as the URL of the annotation is not currently used. That would be a less than intuitive solution-perhaps writing it to both the Spotlight comments field and the URL of the annotation might work for everyone? Another limitation in the current implementation is that if the annotation is deleted, the original document still has a URL that now points to a non-existent document. Don’t know how this could be addressed, without perhaps creating a delete annotation script that writes the URL back to the original document and then deletes the annotation.