Hello,
Does anyone know how I can review a certain amount of pages in “Study” from a large PDF in my “Documents” section? I want to be able to review one chapter from my textbook without having the entire textbook transfer as a notebook under “Study”.
I use Preview to trim textbooks. No point in having the whole thing in MarginNotes except by chapter.
If you want to use Preview to do this, make a copy of the PDF and then open it in Preview. Then you select the pages you don’t want and either just press the delete key or delete them through a menu. I usually leave the references pages in and possibly the index as well. Also leaving the table of contents in helps if you want to know that another chapter exists without having to open the PDF.
On my storage I have the text book, then a folder with the same name and “chapters” where I’ve put the extracted chapters from various textbooks I’ve done this with. I title the files with the textbook name and and ‘CHAPTER NAME ONLY’ at the end of the title. It keeps things tidy and clear.
Skimmed means I’ve used an app called Skim to make some excerpts, sometimes I use that when I don’t need to margin note overhead. I store the exported pdfd file from Skim in the folder as well. It’s transportable and can be read on any Mac with Skim.
Edit: You make a copy of the PDF because Preview automatically saves your changes and you don’t want to go deleting pages in the original textbook.
Hello,
Thank you for the response. So you mean I should import PDFs into MarginNote 3 already separated? For example, separating a textbook PDF into separate PDFs based on say a chapter and then importing it into MarginNote 3?
Well, I hesitate to use the word ‘should’ but that is what I do to get the effect you describe. As far as I know, there is no way to edit/trim pdfs within MarginNote so I’ve built this step into my workflow to make files more manageable for me.
Short answer: yes
Do you know if there is a multi-monitor setting? I have a triple monitor and I believe the MacBook is limited to only two monitors. I was wondering how I could say open two pdfs on one monitor and then the mindmap/notes on a separate monitor?
I have heard of those running two instances of the program (duplicate the app) and having some success but I just tried it and adding an excerpt in one copy of the app did not make the node appear in the other app’s mind map. This comes as no surprise really but I thought it worthy of trying.
I believe where I heard of this is on the iPad which does allow two instances of the same app.
It would be very nice if we could disconnect the document from the mind map without having to ‘float’ things within one large window. It may be that there are knock-on effects that would cause problems if this were to be the case and that is why the MN crew don’t do it.
Could I run my MacBook onto external displays and then resize the window across both monitors? The monitor bezels would; make a division between the app.
That is how some of us work with multiple monitors so I’m sure that would be fine. Best thing to do is just to try it and see if it works for you.
