Some of the most important things you want to remember live in documents you didn't write: textbooks, lecture slides, research papers, and articles. Once you've uploaded a file to RemNote (see Uploading PDFs to RemNote if you haven't done that yet), you can use the built-in RemNote Reader to highlight it, annotate it, and create notes and flashcards from it, all without leaving the app.
Annotation is optimized for PDFs, but you can upload a wide variety of other files too, including word-processor documents (such as .docx and .odt), slide presentations (such as .pptx and .odp), and plain text files. RemNote automatically converts these to PDFs so you can read and annotate them the same way. You can also annotate web pages with the Web Reader.
In this article, we’ll discuss PDFs, but other files work the same way, and the web reader is similar as well (see its article for notes on the differences).
The RemNote Reader is a Pro feature, but you can annotate up to 3 PDFs on the Free plan to try it out before committing to a subscription.
Note: The Reader's AI features, including Guided Learn Mode, the AI Tutor, AI flashcard generation, and others discussed in this article, run on AI credits. See AI Credits to learn how they work.
The layout
When you open a PDF, you'll see a split-screen view made up of these areas:
The PDF itself in the center.
A toolbar of annotation tools underneath the PDF.
A sidebar on the right with extra tools (Learn PDF, AI Tutor, Summary, and Highlights).
Alongside the PDF you'll also have the Notes pane, where you write your own notes and flashcards. You can put the Notes pane on the left or the right of the PDF, whichever you prefer. In this article we'll keep it on the left.
Two ways to study from a PDF
There are two ways to learn from a PDF in RemNote, and you can mix them however you like.
Let the AI guide you. The Learn PDF button launches Guided Learn Mode, which breaks the document into sections and builds a personalized study program for you, complete with summaries, flashcard practice, and quizzes. It's the quickest way to go from "I just uploaded this" to actually knowing the material. We describe it under Learn PDF below, and you can read the full details in Guided Learn Mode.
Read and annotate it yourself. Read the PDF at your own pace, highlight what matters, turn highlights and ideas into flashcards (by hand in the Notes pane or with the image-occlusion tools), and practice those cards over time. This is the classic, hands-on approach, and most of this article covers the tools that make it work.
Neither way is "the right one." Some people use the guided mode for a first pass and then annotate the parts they want to go deeper on.
The document view and toolbar
Underneath the PDF is a set of tools you use to annotate as you read. You can adjust where the toolbar sits and which tools it shows from the ... menu in the top-right, under Customize Reader.
Most of these tools behave just like they do in Handwritten documents, but a few are specific to the PDF Reader, and we'll cover those one by one below. You can configure any tool by clicking it in the toolbar, for example to change the color of the highlight pen or the thickness of an arrow.
Creating a highlight
To highlight text, select the first tool in the toolbar, hover your mouse over the text until the I-beam cursor appears, then click and drag to select the appropriate text. Click the Highlight button to highlight text.
If you click on the text highlight tool in the toolbar, you can configure a few things:
Highlight color
Auto Highlight: when you select any text and release the mouse button, the text is immediately highlighted.
Snap Highlight to Word: if enabled, the text highlight will automatically select entire words when you hover your mouse over the text, instead of highlighting exactly the symbols that you have selected. If you mostly just highlight things, you may find this convenient; if you're often trying to do non-highlight tasks like creating AI flashcards when you select text, you'll probably find it annoying.
In addition to text highlights, you can create area highlights, either by selecting the Area Highlight tool in the toolbar or by holding down Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and drawing a rectangular box with a click and drag. Area highlights copy an exact image of the selected area to your clipboard, so they're useful for capturing tables, figures, and other layout-sensitive elements of a PDF.
As with text highlights, you can change the color of an area highlight by clicking the tool in the toolbar, or turn on Auto Highlight so the box is captured as soon as you release the mouse.
Pasting a highlight into your notes
When you finish making a highlight of either type, a reference to it is copied to your clipboard, and if the Notes pane is open, your cursor jumps into it. You can now press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) to paste that reference, which will appear as an underlined version of the text of that highlight; clicking on it will take you to the location of the highlight in the PDF. (For an area highlight, you'll get a linked image instead of linked text)
If you'd rather paste something else, choose Pin, Text with Pin, Text, or Source from the menu that appears after pasting:
Pin: Rather than showing the full text of the highlight, show just a pin icon. When you click on the pin, you’ll jump to the location of the highlight. Usually, you’ll drop a pin in the same bullet as some other notes you’ve just written, to indicate what passage in the PDF the notes correspond to.
Text with Pin: As the name suggests, this pastes the text followed by a pin. Use this option if you want to start with the text that was already in the PDF, but edit it slightly (you can't edit the text of the default Reference that's pasted – it's an exact mirror of the text in the PDF).
Text: Pastes the highlight as plain text instead of a reference.
Source: This adds the highlight as an inline source of the bullet you paste on. This exists primarily for users who have been using RemNote for a long time and are in the habit of using sources instead of pins throughout their knowledge bases – if you're not sure what it is, don't worry about it.
An area highlight pastes as a reference by default too, and all of the options above work the same way (with "text" replaced by an image of the highlighted area). For area highlights you'll also see an AI convert to text option, which uses AI to extract the text from the image and paste it into your notes as regular text.
Highlight options
Click an existing highlight again to see more options for it.
From left to right, these are:
AI Cards: The main ideas of the sentence or passage will be used to suggest several possible flashcards. Click one to add it to your notes, or choose Bulk Create More AI Cards to suggest a more complete set of flashcards or customize options.
Highlight: Change the color of the highlight. The default choice, No Color In Editor, appears as yellow within the PDF and has no background color when you paste pins or quotes in the editor. The six colors to the right will both change the highlight color in the PDF and change the background color of pins and quotes.
Notes: Attach arbitrary text to this highlight. You’ll see the text if you click on the highlight later or view it in the Highlights tab of the sidebar, and you’ll be able to search for it from global search.
This is not the primary way to take notes on a PDF in RemNote, however – normally you do that by typing in the Notes pane described below.
Explain: Ask RemNote's AI for a brief description of this section, which is handy when you hit an unfamiliar term or concept. For follow-up questions, open the AI Tutor (described below).
Copy (Cmd+C): Copy a reference to this highlight to your clipboard (the same thing that happens automatically when you initially create the highlight).
Copy as Plain Text (Cmd+Shift+C): Copy just the selected text, with no link back to the highlight's location.
Delete: Remove the highlight. Any references/links to the highlight in your notes will stop working, but they will show the title of the PDF and the text of the highlight after the words Deleted Bullet, to be sure you don’t lose any information.
Note: Some of these options will not appear until you create a highlight – that is, if you just drag over some text, you'll need to click the Highlight button before you'll see all the options.
Using the drawing tools
The rest of the tools in the toolbar are the same ones available in any handwritten document in RemNote. We won’t describe every one here, but we’ll cover the ones you’ll use most often while annotating a PDF. To see the full list of drawing tools, click the rightmost See more Drawing tools button.
You can read more about all tools in the Handwriting and Drawing Overview article.
You can also rearrange, hide, and add tools from the ... menu in the upper right, under Configure Toolbar.
Select tool: Drag to select items you've added with the other annotation tools. Click it again to choose which kinds of items to select.
Pan tool: Move around the PDF. This is especially handy on the mobile app, or when you've zoomed in and need to move both vertically and horizontally
Highlight Pen: Draw freehand on the PDF with a transparent highlight. Unlike the Text and Area highlight tools, pen highlights can't be pasted into your Notes
Eraser: Quickly erase items made with the other tools. Click it again to choose which kinds of items to erase while leaving the rest intact.
Occlusion Box Flashcard: Add a box over something you want to test yourself on. Each box becomes a flashcard. Click the tool again to change the box shape, or to make the boxes transparent in the PDF so they don't get in the way of reading.
Occlusion Tape Flashcard: Like the Occlusion Box tool, but instead of preset shapes you draw freely over the PDF, and a card is generated from whatever is hidden under the tape.
On a tablet, the drawing tools are especially nice: you can highlight and write directly on the PDF with an Apple Pencil or another stylus.
If you are on a computer or have a keyboard connected to your tablet, you can switch between drawing tools quickly by pressing the number keys, in the order the tools appear in your toolbar, or the first letter of a tool's name. Hover over a tool to see its shortcut and description. For example, you can select the first Select tool with 1 or S, or the Highlight Pen with 4 or H.
Taking notes
The Notes pane is where you write your own notes and create flashcards. It works exactly like the editor does in a normal RemNote document, so we won't go into the basics here.
In the Notes pane you can write free-form notes, paste highlights, write flashcards from scratch, and clean up any flashcards you've generated with AI. (Some AI flashcards come out great the first time, but the ideal way to ask a question is different for every person, so you'll do best by editing some of them to make them feel more familiar and minimize ambiguity.)
To open the Notes pane, click the Notes button in the upper right of the PDF Reader. To close it, click the X in the top right of the pane.
When the Notes pane is open, you'll also see an X in the top right of the PDF itself. Clicking it closes the PDF, and you can reopen it with the Re-Open PDF button in the Sources section just under the document's name.
Linking a PDF to multiple documents
Let's say you're doing research and you keep separate documents for different topics, and you also have a textbook uploaded to RemNote that covers several of those topics. You can add a single PDF as a source to more than one document, so you can keep it open next to whichever document you're working in and add references to it from each one.
To link an existing PDF to a document, open the document, click the Upload PDF/PPT button in the Sources section, then choose ... > Link Documents. Start typing the name of your PDF and click it. You can now open that PDF from this document and keep going. You can link multiple PDFs and RemNote documents to one document this way. You can read more about adding documents and PDFs as sources in the Document Sources article.
When a PDF is linked to more than one document, a Linked documents section appears at the top of the Notes pane, listing every linked document so you can switch between them quickly.
The sidebar (Learn PDF, AI Tutor, Summary, Highlights)
The sidebar on the right offers four extra tools: Learn PDF, AI Tutor, Summary, and Highlights.
Note: If your RemNote window is small, the sidebar may be hidden so the PDF stays readable. Enlarge the window, or click the sidebar icon in the upper right to show it temporarily:
Learn PDF
Learn PDF triggers Guided Learn Mode, an AI-powered, guided experience for learning a document from start to finish. After you upload a file, choose how well you already know the content and click Generate Learning Materials. The AI tutor reads the PDF and breaks it into bite-sized, manageable sections.
Note: Choosing how well you know the PDF doesn't change which materials get generated, only the order you're shown them in. If the content is new to you, the tutor suggests reading a summary of the PDF first, then doing flashcard practice and a quiz. If you already know it well, you're sent straight to flashcards and a quiz, with the summary reading optional.
AI Tutor
As you read, you'll sometimes hit a new idea or a question you need answered before you can keep going. The AI Tutor tab lets you ask without leaving the PDF.
The AI Tutor is powered by RemNote's Smart Balanced model by default, but you can switch to a variety of other popular models by clicking the model's name and choosing a recent model from a major AI provider.
The tutor can see the contents of your PDF, and it can search your other notes when that helps it give a better answer. In a response, click the page indicators to jump to the source.
If the tutor teaches you something new, you can use the Make Flashcards button to suggest flashcards to help you remember that. You can learn more in AI Tutor Chat.
Summary
The Summary sidebar section shows an outline of the contents of your PDF, written by RemNote AI. If the PDF has chapters, sections, or other headings, the summary follows them; if it doesn't, the AI creates headings based on the content. Where Learn PDF walks you through the material section by section, the Summary gives you an overview of the whole document at once.
You can use the summary to get a high-level view before you start learning the details. Or, for a complex document you only want to skim, you can read mostly from the summary and hop into the PDF whenever something catches your eye. Click the page number next to a point to scroll to exactly where that idea appears in the PDF.
Click the arrow to the left of any point to expand it for more detail.
To copy the whole summary, click the Copy button next to the PDF's name.
Creating cards from a Summary
If you spot a high-level point in the summary you'd like to remember, you can make AI flashcards from it directly. Click the flashcard icon next to a point to suggest cards for it, or click the icon next to a heading or the document title to bulk-generate cards for that whole section.
When you create AI flashcards from a PDF, the AI cites its source in a pin. Click the pin to see the original sentence in the PDF:
You can also generate flashcards from the entire summary or the full PDF at once. Click the Create AI Cards button at the top of the Summary tab to open a card-generation menu where you can choose which topics to cover, pick the AI model, and customize the cards. See Generating Flashcards with AI for more on that menu.
Summary views
Besides the default summary of the whole PDF, you can switch to other views:
The leftmost view shows the Study Guide generated as part of the Learn PDF experience. It pulls together the key concepts, must-remember facts, comparisons to related topics, and other information that helps you build a quick understanding and a roadmap of the subject. Generate Practice Quizzes based on this content directly from this section to test your overall retention
For just a high-level skeleton, click Headers Only under the PDF's title to see only the headings RemNote AI generated, or Original Headers Only to see the table of contents that came with the PDF, if it had one.
Highlights
In the Highlights tab, you can see a list of all the highlights you've made in the document, along with any notes you attached to them. Click on the pin icon at the left to jump to the highlight in the document.
Configuring the PDF reader
You can find more options to customize the behavior of PDF annotation by clicking the … button on the toolbar. We'll cover these in more detail below.
Text Reader mode
Text Reader mode converts a PDF into a clean text document. RemNote AI scans the whole PDF, extracts the text and images, and lays them out for easy reading: the text is centered, you can move between paragraphs with the arrow keys, and you can adjust settings like font and line height by selecting the Appearance option in the ... menu and adjusting these settings.
Text to speech
Once a PDF is in Text Reader mode, you can turn on Listen with text to speech to have the document read aloud. The option sits just below the Text Reader switch in the ... menu.
Text to speech is especially handy in two situations. The first is hands-free listening to lighter material. If you have a list of low-density documents, such as news articles or short summaries, you can listen to them using RemNote on your computer or on the go in the mobile app.
The second is reading and listening to the same document at once, sometimes called bimodal or immersion reading. Because RemNote maps each spoken word to its spot on the page, you can follow along with your eyes while you listen. Giving both your eyes and ears the same words to work on leaves little room for distraction, and some people find it lets them settle into a focused flow state much faster than reading alone. This one is anecdotal, so give it a shot and see how you like it.
Text to speech only works on PDFs in Text Reader mode. You can start playback from the original PDF view, but doing so switches the document to text view automatically.
Note: Text to speech currently supports English only. Support for more languages is something we plan to add in future updates.
Configuring Text to speech
After you enable it, a player appears at the bottom of the screen. Adjust the speed with the speed button on the left (it starts at 1x). To remove the player, open the ... menu and turn off the Listen with text to speech toggle.
Navigating with Text to speech
When you press Play, playback starts from the beginning. As it reads, RemNote highlights the words being spoken and scrolls to keep them roughly centered on screen.
To listen to a different part, you have a few options:
Use the back and forward buttons in the player to jump 15 seconds in either direction, handy for skipping a short stretch or replaying something you just heard.
Click the horizontal line in the player to jump straight to another part of the PDF.
Click any sentence in the Text Reader and choose Play audio to start reading from there.
More annotation options
The rest of the ... menu holds these options:
Editor position: Choose whether the Notes pane sits to the left or the right of the PDF.
Toolbar position: Adjust where the toolbar sits.
Configure toolbar: Rearrange the tools in the toolbar, and hide or add tools.
Appearance: Set the PDF colors to dark, light, Solarized, or the same as your current RemNote theme (see Dark Mode). You can also switch between PDF Reader and Text Reader mode here.
Add Page: Add a blank page at the chosen spot. Useful for taking longer notes right inside the PDF as you read. When you're focused on a page you added, this menu also offers an option to delete it.
View Drawing Trash: See everything you've drawn, typed, or added with the annotation tools and then deleted, and restore anything from the trash.
Search in PDF (or press Ctrl+F): Search for text in the PDF.
Download PDF: Click here to grab a copy of the PDF you’re annotating. All the highlights you made in RemNote Reader will be saved in the downloaded copy.
Run OCR with AI: If your PDF doesn't allow you to select or copy text, it likely lacks an underlying text layer. Running OCR (optical character recognition) fills in this text layer and makes the text searchable and selectable, enabling features like highlighting and creating AI flashcards from the content.
Help: Open this page for easy reference.
Flashcards: If you've added flashcards in the PDF's highlights or Notes section, you can practice them from here.
Move: Move the PDF to a different folder in your Knowledge Base.
Delete: Delete the PDF and all its highlights, notes, and flashcards.
Keyboard shortcuts
Navigation
Up/Down Arrow: Pan one line up or down;
Left/Right Arrows: Go to the previous or the next page;
Page Up/Page Down: Pan the file "one screen" Up or Down, respectively
Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac): Search text in the PDF
Enter, while using the search bar: go to the next search result
Shift+Enter, while using the search bar: go to the previous search result
Highlighting
Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on a Mac), after dragging to select some text: Highlight and copy the text.
If Auto Highlight is turned on, you will also copy the text after the highlight is created from dragging.
Pressing Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on a Mac), after selecting an existing highlight will copy that highlight.
N, after dragging to select some text: add a Note attached to that text.
If Auto Highlight is turned off, this will also add a colored highlight to the text.
You can also press N after selecting a Highlight to add a note to it.
Ctrl+drag (Cmd+drag on a Mac): Area highlight
Delete, after selecting a highlight: Delete the highlight
Ctrl+Alt+4-9 (Cmd+Opt+4-9 on a Mac), after dragging to select some text or an area: Select a new highlight color (4-9 correspond to the colors in the same order they appear in the menu)
Ctrl+Alt+0: highlight with the No Color in Editor option.
This will be the same shortcut assigned to the Clear Highlight shortcut in your global keyboard shortcut settings.
Workflows
Note: these videos were recorded using the older version of the PDF reader, but the core concepts and the workflows can still be applied to learning from your textbooks.
Reading & Remembering Lecture Notes
Staring at lecture notes until your mind melts? This 5-step process makes active reading easy.
Reading & Understanding Research Papers | 3 Pass Technique
Feel overwhelmed reading research papers? You're probably reading wrong. The Three Pass Method is a tried-and-true method to reading papers that helps you read at the right level of detail.