PDF scroll position sync

Use case or problem

I use Obsidian to catalogue and read research papers stored as .pdf files, which I imagine is a fairly popular use-case. One thing that makes this pretty difficult is that the scroll position within the pdf, which could be hundreds of pages long, is lost every time I close the tab. After some googling, I don’t see a way to solve this. There’s a plugin called Remember Cursor Position, discussed here, which seems to be a solution for notes, but doesn’t work for pdf files.

Proposed solution

It seems like something that might be necessary to do in the app vs as an extension, although I might be wrong about that. The app could use a dictionary of file path to percent read, and resolve conflicts by taking the most recent read state. This would add a negligeable overhead to the app storage, and really improve the experience.

Current workaround (optional)

Remember the scroll position or write it down in another note.

Related feature requests (optional)

Doing the same for notes, as discussed in the linked thread, would also be nice.

3 Likes

+1 I’d vote for this feature.
Retaining pdf’s last reading position has been quite common in the old days in various pdf reading plugins.
Nowadays, many plugins simply disabled this feature. Why don’t set a parameter that people can choose their taste, reading from last position or from start.

+1

I also have a similar workflow. Obsidian’s default PDF Viewer imo is quite primitive. I wish they have something planned for addressing this issue in future because if we could be able to integrate the PDFs inside Obsidian PKMs, that would be incredibly useful. At the moment, there are solutions for highlighting, annotating, pulling the annotations etc. but they are all finicky to work and does not feel organic. Logseq solves this problems so it must be possible to realise.

1 Like