Reading and Annotations

Reading and Annotations

Selecting text

Select text directly in the PDF. Inleaf Reader reconstructs text across lines and pages and tries to exclude repeated margins, page numbers, and inferred figure regions.

PDF structure varies widely, so this cleanup is heuristic. If the selected text is wrong because of OCR, you can correct the original text in the annotation editor.

Annotation types

• Highlight: mark a passage with a chosen color.
• Underline: preserve the page appearance while emphasizing a passage.
• Note: attach your own explanation, question, or reminder.
• Tags: organize annotations with reusable labels.

All annotation actions occur beside the PDF. They do not open the right panel automatically.

Editing and deleting

Saved annotations can be edited beside the original passage. The editor lets you change:

• selected text;
• note content;
• tags;
• color;
• highlight or underline style.

Deleting an annotation offers a temporary undo path in the reader. The right panel also provides Jump, Edit, Copy Markdown, and Delete actions when you want to review many annotations together.

Browsing annotations

Open the right panel and choose Annotations. You can filter or sort by:

• text query;
• tag;
• color;
• annotation type;
• document position or update time.

The panel is user-invoked and remains hidden when the reader starts.

Exporting

From the annotation panel you can export:

• Markdown: portable text suitable for notes, Git, and AI tools.
• Annotated PDF: a copy of the PDF containing visible highlights, underlines, and comments.

Exports are written to the .inleaf-reader directory beside the source PDF.

PDFs that cannot be selected

A scanned PDF may contain only page images. In that case, run OCR with another tool first and reopen the OCR-enabled PDF. Inleaf Reader does not currently add OCR by itself.