I appreciate the effort to which the staff and community have gone to try and make this work through comparatively tedious workarounds when compared to what a direct link to a piece of content would just do. At the same time, I think the huge number of views this and other threads on this topic have received, demonstrates a common need among writers that literatureandlatte’s development team is either not seeing, or choosing not to see because a solution may be complex to code.
Yes, I can create a complicated system of tags that requires me to tag both ends and then search for the common tag, but this is fundamentally a huge time waster compared to how it could work. I shouldn’t have to use a 3-5 step process with multiple sets of keyboard shortcuts for something that could be completed in 1-2 steps max if implemented the most efficient way. In a single research paper, I might have 200 references. Having to spend 30 seconds following the suggested methods above on each of these adds up rapidly to where I’m spending hours per paper doing something that could have taken 2 seconds. Multiply this by the number of papers I write per year, and the number of users that could benefit from this, and that is thousands of hours lost because of a single inefficiency.
The very fact that it takes walls of text to describe these workarounds speaks against them. I shouldn’t have to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out how this even works. If it’s really going to be the only way forward for the next decade, an instructional video may be simpler, but what I get from this is that the only way forward until LiteratureandLatte makes it a priority, is to just direct link straight to devonthink files using their link-to-phrase system, which works beautifully, effectively, and efficiently. Is it ideal to have to be running two apps just to make this work? No. Will it save me hundreds of hours in the long run? Absolutely. And I think it’s sad that this isn’t obvious to everyone else here.
Apologies if this comes across a little sharp though. I do appreciate the effort and interest in helping your user base. This just seems like a very simple, yet somehow intentional oversight based on the archaic, subjective preference of a few.