PDF editor: Incremental reading (Anki add-on as a case-study)

As an ex-Anki user, I would love the pdf editor to contain some of the features of one of their best add-on’s: Searching, PDF Reading & Note-Taking in Add Dialog. If devs have the time, I highly recommend downloading the add-on to see how it super-charges the incremental reading process. Some nice features:

  1. All pdfs automatically to a reading queue. Depending on the set priority level, the more ‘important pdfs’ will come on your queue first. An excellent way for the serendipitous discovery of older files and for interleaving reading for active learning

  2. Like RemNote, it can remember the position of highlights. But an advantage it has is that you can make flashcards on the fly. These flashcards are tied to the position of the pdf, even if you edit the wording of the cards. We can’t do this in Remnote, as editing the highlights breaks the hyperlink position, i.e. you can’t jump to the highlight location on the pdf anymore.

Other than that, UI improvements over the current RemNote reader:

  • Always remembers the last reading position. It’s not always stable in RemNote
  • Ability to change the background of pdfs, the dark mode function is particularly good for night reading
  • Extremely fast loading of the pdfs, while RemNote struggles with large files
  • Progress tracking (mark pages read) and Pomodoro timers. They may seem gimmicky, but they perform an excellent job of gamifying the reading process

Hope this feedback is useful!