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Learning from PDFs and Files with the RemNote Reader
Learning from PDFs and Files with the RemNote Reader

Read & highlight PDFs, slides, and other files within RemNote, then link parts of your documents to your highlights for easy attribution.

Soren Bjornstad avatar
Written by Soren Bjornstad
Updated over a week ago

Once you've uploaded a file to RemNote, you can use the built-in RemNote Reader to highlight, annotate, and create notes and flashcards based on it.

Annotation is optimized for PDFs, but a wide variety of other files can be uploaded, including word-processor documents (.docx, .odt), slide presentations (.pptx, .odp), and text files. RemNote will automatically convert such files to PDFs so you can read and annotate them. You can also annotate web pages with the Web Reader. In this article, we’ll focus on PDFs, but other files will work similarly, 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.

When you annotate a PDF, you’ll see a split-screen view, with the PDF on the left and a sidebar containing your notes and other PDF tools on the right:

The document view (left side: Learn/Practice/Quiz)

On the left, you'll see a pane with three tabs at the top: Learn, Practice, and Quiz.

On the Learn tab, you interact with the document you've uploaded by reading it, highlighting important portions, and creating flashcards. Often, you'll also want to take notes in the Editor tab on the right sidebar.

When you're done reading and creating flashcards, you'll proceed to the Practice tab to initially practice the flashcards you've created. (You can come back here anytime and practice them again, but they'll also join your global queue on a spaced-repetition schedule so you'll never forget them!)

You can optionally proceed to the Quiz tab, where RemNote AI can generate a few multiple-choice questions to check your understanding.

Once you know their function, the Practice and Quiz tabs are largely self-explanatory (just check out Getting Started with Spaced Repetition if you aren't sure how to practice flashcards in RemNote), so we will not return to them here. The remainder of this section will be about the Learn tab.

Creating a highlight

To highlight text, hover your mouse over the text until the I-beam cursor appears, then click and drag to select the appropriate text. When you release the mouse button, the text will be highlighted.

In addition to these text highlights, you can create area highlights by holding down Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac), then drawing a rectangular box by clicking and dragging. Area highlights copy exact images of the selected area to your clipboard, so they're useful for capturing tables, figures, and other layout-sensitive elements of a PDF. Additionally, some PDFs (usually those that started life as a low-quality scan of a paper document) lack a text layer entirely (the PDF is just an image underneath), which will prevent text highlighting from working. Area highlights will still allow you to highlight in such PDFs.

If holding down Ctrl or Cmd is inconvenient, you can also switch to area highlight mode by clicking the icon in the top right:

Pasting a highlight into your notes

When you finish making a highlight of either type, a reference to the highlight will be copied to your clipboard. If you have the Editor tab open in the sidebar viewing your notes, your cursor will also leap into that pane. 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. (In the case of an area highlight, you’ll have a linked image instead of linked text.)

If you prefer, you can select Pin, Text, or Text with Pin 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. Ordinarily, you’ll put a pin in the same Rem as some other notes you’ve just written, to indicate what passage in the PDF the notes correspond to.

  • Text: Instead of pasting a reference to the highlight, paste it as plain text.

  • 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).

Highlight options

You can see more options for the highlight by clicking on it again.

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 Editor pane.

  • Explain: Ask RemNote's AI for a brief description of this section. This is handy if you come across an unfamiliar term or concept. If you have further follow-up questions, you can open the AI Tutor to ask them.

  • Copy: Copy a reference to this highlight to your clipboard (the same thing that happens automatically when you initially create the highlight).

  • 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 Rem, to be sure you don’t lose any information.

AI Key Points

You can optionally turn on AI Key Points from the … menu to show a brief summary of each page at the bottom of the page:

If any of these points seem important and you haven't yet created flashcards about them, you can click on one of the flashcard icons to create AI flashcards about that point, or all the key points at once.


The sidebar (right side: Summary/AI Tutor/Editor/Highlights)

The sidebar offers four additional tools: Summary, AI Tutor, Editor, and Highlights.

Note: If your RemNote window is particularly small, the sidebar may be hidden to avoid making the PDF too small to read. If so, enlarge the window, or click on the sidebar icon in the upper-right to show it temporarily:

Summary

The Summary sidebar section shows an outline of the contents of your PDF, written by RemNote AI. If your PDF has chapters and sections or other headings, the summary will be structured using those headings. If it doesn't, the AI will create headings based on the content of the document.

You can use the summary to get a first high-level view of the document before trying to learn its contents. Or, for complex documents you only want to skim, you can read primarily from the summary and hop over to the PDF when you see something interesting. Click on the page number next to a point in the summary to scroll to the exact point the idea is found in the PDF:

You can click on the triangle next to a point in the summary to get more detail:

You can also create AI flashcards directly from the summary if you find high-level points you'd like to remember. Click on the icon next to a point to suggest flashcards covering that point:

Or click on the icon next to a heading or the document title to bulk-generate flashcards on that section:

When you create AI flashcards from a PDF, the AI cites its source in a pin. Click on the pin to see the original in the PDF view:

AI Tutor

As you read, sometimes you'll encounter new ideas or important questions you need to get more context on to continue understanding the source. The AI Tutor tab provides a convenient way to answer simple questions without leaving the PDF.

The AI Tutor is powered by GPT-4o-mini by default, but you can select from a variety of other popular models in Settings > AI > AI Tutor Chat Model.

The tutor has access to the contents of your PDF and anything you've selected. In a response, click on 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:

Editor

In the Editor tab, you can write arbitrary notes, paste highlights, write your own flashcards from scratch, and clean up and customize any flashcards you've used the AI generation features to create. (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.)

The editor in the Editor tab works exactly like the editor does in a normal document in RemNote, so we won't go into it further here.

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.

More annotation options

You can find more options to customize the behavior of PDF annotation by clicking the … button on the toolbar.

  • Search in PDF (or press Ctrl+F): Search for text in the PDF.

  • Enable/Disable AI Key Points: See the AI Key Points section.

  • Change theme: Set the PDF colors to dark, light, Solarized, inverted (swap black to white throughout the PDF, including on images), or the same as the current RemNote theme (see Dark Mode).

  • Settings > Auto highlight: With this option on, selecting text will automatically create a highlight. With the option off, you’ll click the Highlight button in the toolbar that appears after making a selection to finish highlighting. 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.

  • Settings > Snap highlight to words: If turned on (the default), you won’t be able to select individual letters within a word; the highlight will jump to the nearest word boundary. This makes highlighting easier by reducing the amount of precision you need to take with your mouse location to get a clean highlight, but if you ever want to highlight only part of a word, you'll need to turn it off.

  • Download PDF: Click here to grab a copy of the PDF you’re annotating.

  • Help: Open this page for easy reference.

  • Flashcards: If you've added flashcards in the PDF's highlights or Editor 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: Pane 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.


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