Creating new documents in a Notebook in MarginNote & exporting

Feature Requests
1

I’ve been using MarginNote for a little while now and back when I used MarginNote 3 I used to use document layers to split my notebook into assignments for ease of exporting to pdf for printing. I’ve found that this is a bit clunky with MarginNote 4 though because unlike MarginNote 3 which resets the number of pages in a document when creating a new document or i.e. layer, MarginNote 4 keeps the number of pages of the previous document layer when creating it. This is a bit tedious, because let’s say one of my previous assignments was 20 pages long. If I say, create a new document/layer and only use a single page, I still have 19 blank additional pages which will always be exported for a single page assignment. Don’t get me wrong, I can fix this with a PDF manager but it’s quite a tedious thing to have to do. Is there no way around having all those blank pages on additional pages?

Additionally though, I think there should be options when exporting to flattened pdf that should be implemented. These options would not be for this specifically, but could help too, and should certainly be implemented on an update rather than a new iteration of the app which would most likely be years from now. What I mean by this is that there should be a way of choosing what pages to export to pdf, as well as choosing the image quality of the pdf. Currently exporting to pdf is FAR too space costly with several megabytes of space being required for exporting. I totally understand why this image quality could be wanted when looking at how much we can zoom in, but there should also be an option to export a lower quality pdf when we don’t require such detailed zoom capabilities and are simply creating handwritten documents of normal font size. And being able to choose what pages are exported should also simply be a given, I mean look at how web-browsers export a pdf, they always ask for the pages you wish to export and don’t simply just export them all in full, because chances are you may not always need all of them, especially when looking at how layers is currently implemented in MarginNote 4 which differs from MarginNote 3.

2

Thank you for your valuable feedback. We’re actively reviewing your suggestions about document layers and PDF exports to prioritize improvements.
To ensure these changes truly fit your workflow, could you share more details about how you use layers for assignments?

  1. Why do you choose document layers for splitting tasks?
  • For example:
    • Is it to reuse a base document (e.g., repeatedly practicing a test paper in new layers)?
    • Or to separate collaborative work (e.g., different layers for group members)?
      A brief description or screenshot of your layer structure would be immensely helpful.

Best regards,
MarginNote Support Team

3

Following our discussion, we propose the following approach:

  1. Create a Virtual Document containing the specific sections you wish to export.
  2. Export the Virtual Document directly, which will include only your selected content.

Would this method address your needs? If you encounter any issues or require further guidance on setting up virtual documents, feel free to ask. We’re happy to provide step-by-step instructions or examples.

Looking forward to your feedback.

Best regards,
MarginNote Support Team