I have been seeing tweets from the Overview Project that as of today, yoiu can split PDF files into pages without going through DocumentCloud or other tools.
I don’t have Overview installed so I can’t confirm that statement but if true, it is a step in the right direction.
Think about it for a moment.
If you “tag” a one hundred page PDF file with all the “tags” you need to return to that document, what happens? Sure, you can go back to that document, but then you have to search for the material you were tagging.
It is a question of the granularity of your “tagging.” Now imagine tagging a page in PDF. Is it now easier for you to return to that one page? Can you also say it would be easier for someone else to return to the same page following your path?
Which makes you wonder about citation practices that simply cite an article and not a location within the article.
Are they trying to make your job as a reader that much harder?