ICOR for Life - PDF Annotation

Highlight a PDF and get a note, not a highlight.

Select text in a PDF, pick a colour, add your thought. What you get is a real note in your vault: the quote, and underneath it, what you made of it.

Part of the ICOR for Life suite.

What it is for

A highlight inside a PDF is a dead end. You can see it only by opening that PDF and scrolling to it, which means you will not see it again.

A highlight that is a note can be linked, searched, collected on a Topic page and dropped on a canvas. The difference is not the highlighting; it is that six months later your Topic page can gather the passages from twenty PDFs without you opening any of them.

Add your own thought to the highlight. A quote is someone else's sentence. A quote with your reaction under it is your note. That one line is the whole difference, and it costs five seconds at the only moment you will remember why you kept it.

Getting started

Install and enable the plugin, then open any PDF in Obsidian.

Select some text. A small toolbar appears: pick a colour, copy a link, or add a note. That is it.

To capture a chart or a figure, hold Cmd, or Ctrl on Windows and Linux, and drag a box around it.

What you can do with a highlight

• Open it from a link, straight back to its place in the PDF.
• Drag it onto a canvas, where it becomes a card showing just the quote or the captured image.
• See them all in a sidebar for the open PDF.
• Search them like any other note, because they are notes.

Every highlight is painted back over the PDF, so the document still looks marked up when you return to it.

What it touches

• Creates one note per highlight in your vault, and a PNG for a captured area.
• Reads canvas files so a dropped highlight lands correctly. It never writes them.
• Never modifies the PDF. Your original file is left exactly as it was.

It makes no network connection and starts no process.

Good to know

• Desktop and mobile. On a phone the toolbar is the only route, since the PDF viewer has no context menu there.
• Beta. If something looks off, open an issue.

Support

Open an issue on this repository. For security problems, see SECURITY.md.

Licence

Source-available, see LICENSE. Not open source. Bundled third-party components: see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.