Inside the ScholarThread reader
One reading surface for PDFs and EPUBs, five highlight colors that turn straight into notes, and deep links that take you from a citation chip back to the exact passage it came from.
Most reference managers hand off reading to whatever PDF viewer is already on your machine, and treat EPUBs as an afterthought if they're supported at all. That split is where annotation habits fall apart — a highlight in one app, a note in another, no connection between the two beyond whatever you remember to copy-paste. ScholarThread reads both formats in the same surface, with the same tools, so a highlight is never more than one step from becoming something you can actually write from.
One reader, two formats
Open a PDF or an EPUB from your library and you land in the same reading surface either way — same highlighting tools, same navigation, same everything. You shouldn't have to relearn how to annotate just because a publisher shipped one book as an EPUB and the paper you're reading alongside it as a PDF.
Highlight in five colors, and mean something different by each one
A highlight in ScholarThread isn't just a yellow rectangle. You get five colors, and every highlight is convertible into a note with one action — so the moment you notice something worth keeping, it's a highlight-and-note, not a highlight now and a scramble to remember why later. Using colors consistently (evidence in one, a claim you disagree with in another, a term to look up in a third) turns a single pass through a long paper into something you can scan for structure afterward, not just re-read start to finish.
Deep links: the other half of the citation trail
A highlight is only useful later if you can get back to it fast. Every highlight, every note anchored to a passage, and every citation chip in a grounded chat answer links straight back to that exact page and passage in the reader — not just the paper's detail view, the actual spot. Click a citation while you're reading a chat answer and you land where the claim came from; click a note's source link months later and you land in the same place, not a re-search through a fifty-page PDF trying to relocate the sentence you meant.
That's the mechanism behind ScholarThread's whole "notes should point at their source" idea: the deep link is what makes "point at their source" a real, one-click thing instead of an aspiration.
Finding your way around a long document
A hundred-page PDF or a full monograph isn't something you navigate by scrolling. The reader builds a table of contents from the document's own outline — PDF bookmarks or an EPUB's own structure, whichever the file provides — so you can jump straight to a section by name instead of guessing how far down the page you need to drag. A page-thumbnail panel does the same job visually, for the times you remember roughly what a figure or a page layout looked like but not which section it was in.
Neither replaces reading in order the first time through. Both matter enormously the second and third time, when you're back in a paper looking for one specific thing.
Pick up where you left off
Open a paper on one device, close it, open ScholarThread somewhere else, and the reader puts you back on the same page — no scrolling back through a hundred pages of a monograph to find your spot. Reading state follows your account, not the device you happened to open the file on.
Doing this in ScholarThread
Open any paper or EPUB from your library and the reader is already there — highlight a passage in whichever of the five colors fits what you're marking, convert it to a note in the same motion if it's worth keeping, and trust that clicking back to it later (from a note, a citation chip, or just your own history) lands you on the exact passage, not the general vicinity of it.
The reading surface is the same regardless of format on purpose: the tool shouldn't be the thing you have to think about. The passage should be.