How to annotate PDFs in RemNote?

There are several tools in RemNote’s PDF annotator to let you interact with your PDFs.

To Highlight sections of text on your PDF click and drag to select some text then click the “Add Highlight” button that appears, or hit Enter. You can then select a color, or just hit enter to highlight with the last color used.

You can go back and change the color later by clicking on it and selecting a new one. To delete the highlight, just click on it and select the trashcan/delete icon.

If you open the backside of the PDF you will also see a list of all the pages you highlighted, the text you selected, and the colors you used for each. So if you used a green color for example for everything you wanted to copy into your notes it would be easy to find each example.

You can copy text directly from your PDF into your notes as a Highlight Reference. The text will be copied and be a link directly back to where you got it.

To copy text as a Highlight Reference, select it then hit Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on Mac). Alternative, you can click on a highlighted text (see above) and select the quote icon.

Either way, you can then paste it into your notes, Ctrl+V (Cmd+V), it will show up with an underline to remind you it is a quote.

If you click that reference it will open the PDF it came from and take you straight to the page and line in question.

Sometimes you want to copy over something that isn’t a convenient quote. Either the text is not legible to the computer (like handwriting) or you are copying a graph, chart, table, or other visual.

To select an area of the PDF instead of lines of text hold Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) then click and drag. Once you do, the procedure is the same, simply copy it and then paste it into your notes.

Instead of copying full-text references or large boxes, you can create tiny unobtrusive Pin References in your notes.

These are in fact the default option in the RemNote’s PDF Annotator. Whenever you click the “add highlight” or hit Enter after highlighting a section of text or block in your PDF it is automatically copied as a Pin. If you already have an existing selection highlighted, right click and select the Pin Icon.

No matter what you copied it appears as a simple small Pin when pasted into your notes.

If you click on any Pin it will open the source PDF and take you to the selected text/area.

This makes Pins the perfect way to track sources or clarify information and/or context without cluttering your notes.