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Read PDFs, media, eBooks & webpages

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TL;DR​

Heptabase supports adding PDFs, Readwise highlights, web articles, YouTube videos, Zotero references, and podcasts into your card library through various methods, turning them into cards that can be dragged onto whiteboards. You can annotate PDFs, import captions from YouTube videos, generate transcripts for podcast audio, quickly create AI-generated highlights for web articles and media transcripts, and locate these highlights back to their original content positions, enhancing your reading and comprehension efficiency.

Foreword​

When learning and researching complex topics using Heptabase, many users want to incorporate external resources—such as PDFs of academic papers, highlights from e-books, web articles, recently watched YouTube videos, or podcasts they’ve listened to. In this article, I will introduce how you can easily import these "sources of knowledge" into Heptabase, enabling their use in facilitating your learning and research.

PDF Annotations, Readwise Highlights, and Zotero Sources​

If you frequently read PDFs or e-books, you might create many highlights and annotations during your reading. At Heptabase, we believe these highlights constitute essential material for your learning and research. Therefore, we not only support importing and highlighting PDFs but also integrate with Readwise—a service for organizing highlights—helping you understand and revisit your previous readings more efficiently.

To use PDF highlighting in Heptabase, you can drag PDF files directly from your desktop into your card library or onto whiteboards, converting them into PDF cards. While reading PDF cards, you can select text directly to highlight, or press Cmd/Ctrl and drag with your mouse to highlight specific areas. All your highlights will be stored in the card library as "Highlight Cards."

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If you often highlight content in e-books and use Readwise to manage these highlights, click the settings button at the bottom of Heptabase’s left sidebar, choose Connections, and follow the steps provided to enter your Readwise Token. After completion, all your highlights will also be saved into your card library.

If you use Zotero to manage your academic references and research materials, you can connect your Zotero account to Heptabase to import your bibliographic data, PDFs, annotations, and other attachments directly into your card library. For more details, see the Zotero Sync Q&A.

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With these highlight cards from PDFs and Readwise, you can drag them from the right sidebar onto whiteboards alongside other note cards, helping you think and quickly clarify relationships between these highlights.

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Highlight cards can also be embedded into other note cards, making it easier to reference content from different sources. Doing this is simple: select your desired highlight card, open the menu (…) at the top-right corner, click "Copy link," then paste this link into your note card and select "Paste as embed" to complete the embedding.

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Web Articles, YouTube Videos​

If you frequently acquire knowledge by reading web articles or watching YouTube videos, consider using Heptabase’s built-in Web Clipper to save them into your card library with a single click. Web articles are stored as note cards, while YouTube videos become video cards. These cards can be dragged onto whiteboards, linked, and integrated with your other notes.

When opening a web article card as a tab, you can open the right sidebar, select the Insights feature, and use your chosen language to generate insights for every few hundred words. You can locate back to the corresponding original content from each insight.

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Similarly, when opening a YouTube video card as a tab, if captions are available on YouTube, you can import them with a single click and use the Insight feature to summarize them every few hundred words, with each insight linking to the respective timestamps in the video.

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Through these methods, you can quickly grasp the gist of lengthy articles or interviews and easily locate the parts that interest you in articles or videos, thereby accelerating your knowledge acquisition.

Podcasts​

If you frequently listen to podcasts for knowledge and want to include podcast content into your knowledge base, click the new card button at the top of the left sidebar and choose the Podcast option. You can search for your shows and episodes, saving selected episodes as audio cards in your card library.

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Like video cards, podcast cards also support transcript and insight features. Since most podcasts lack publicly available transcripts like YouTube videos, Heptabase directly uses built-in AI models to transcribe audio to text. Depending on your current subscription plan, the monthly time limit for generating transcripts may vary.

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