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A Smarter PDF Reader for Remembering What You Read
数码荔枝编辑部
When using PDFs to read textbooks and academic papers, many people run into the same problem: you highlight plenty of key points and take notes, but when you open the document again after a while, it feels as though you’ve never read it before, so you have to start from the beginning.
The problem isn’t that you didn’t take notes carefully. It’s that reading, organising and revising have been split up too much — the original text is in the PDF, your notes are in another app, and you have to build the framework yourself all over again.
As a Mac tool designed for in-depth reading and learning, MarginNote has one main goal: to bring all these steps into a single workflow. Whatever you’re reading, thinking about or planning to revise later can stay connected to the original text, without constantly switching between apps. For anyone who needs to organise textbooks, academic papers and other materials over the long term, it’s more like a complete PDF reading and note-taking app.
If you’re choosing a genuine reading and learning tool that suits you, you can first explore the features and usage of MarginNote 4.
Take Notes as You Read
The most frustrating part of reading a PDF isn’t highlighting — it’s having to copy everything somewhere else afterwards and organise it all over again. MarginNote lets you extract content directly from the original text. Each extract becomes a card that you can continue editing and organising.
This card isn’t an isolated note that gets forgotten as soon as it’s written. It remains connected to the original text and can act as a mind-map node, so you can use it for revision later too — the original text, your notes and the knowledge structure won’t become increasingly scattered.
What if some ideas don’t relate to a specific sentence? MarginNote 4 has a “Blank Space” feature. Long-press anywhere in a PDF to insert a dedicated writing space, without having to jump to another notes page just to write a couple of sentences.
Organise Knowledge with Mind Maps
When materials are lengthy, it’s easy to read from beginning to end and end up thinking, “I understand every sentence, but I can’t explain what the whole book was about once I close it.” MarginNote lets you turn the cards you’ve extracted directly into a mind map, connecting scattered information back together.
You can adjust the node hierarchy freely and reorganise content however you like. Cards from different documents can also be placed in the same study set. When working through several sources together, you don’t need to create a separate, unrelated set of notes for each one.
Most importantly, the nodes in the mind map remain connected to the original text. If you forget where a particular point came from, click back to see the exact sentence, instead of staring blankly at a pile of second-hand notes stripped of their context.
From Notes to Revision
With many note-taking apps, the process ends once you’ve written the notes. But the next step is the one that’s often overlooked: how do you bring what you’ve recorded back up for revision? MarginNote’s cards can work as flashcards in their own right, so there’s no need to move them manually to another tool.
The things you extract while reading will appear again when you revise. Taking notes is no longer just a way to keep a record — you’re also preparing the material you’ll need to revise later.
MarginNote 4.4 adds Immersive Mode, which lets you switch between three states: “Read”, “Write” and “Recall”. In Recall mode, extracted content is initially covered with a blur. You have to think of the answer yourself before tapping to reveal it — turning “looking at it again” into genuine active recall.
Let AI Save You Time
With lengthy documents and complex structures, simply organising the table of contents and key points can take half a day. MarginNote now integrates AI into the reading and organisation workflow, helping you analyse documents, generate structures, ask and answer questions, and organise cards.
For example, if you have a long document without a table of contents, you can ask AI to generate an editable structure. When you come across a difficult paragraph, you can ask questions directly about the current content. There’s no need to copy the text and switch to another AI tool, saving you all that back-and-forth.
Recent versions have also strengthened AI book breakdown and question extraction, and now support custom AI. It’s well suited to mechanical tasks such as “finding structure and carrying out initial organisation”. Ultimately, you still decide what to keep and how to organise it.
Reuse the Same Materials Again and Again
What makes MarginNote stand out is that it doesn’t simply combine a reader, mind maps and flashcards. Instead, they share the same set of cards. Extract something once, and you can see it in the document, the mind map and your revision materials.
This means that, no matter how many materials you have, you don’t need to keep copying and pasting between several apps. Textbooks, PDFs and EPUBs can be organised together in study sets, then linked through cards and mind maps.
If you only open PDFs occasionally for a quick look, MarginNote may feel a little heavy. But if you regularly read lengthy materials in depth and organise large amounts of knowledge, its advantages become increasingly clear — less repetitive work, leaving you more time to focus on what you genuinely need to understand and remember.
Finishing a piece of reading isn’t difficult. The difficult part is whether, several months later, you can still quickly find the key points from that time, understand how they relate to one another and put them to use again.
What MarginNote does is connect the chain of “reading → extracting → organising → revising” as closely as possible. Rather than leaving everything you highlighted lying in the PDF, let each reading session produce something you can continue to use in the future. To learn more about genuine Mac learning software and PDF tools, you can also visit the lizhi.shop software store.
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