By Marie-Pier Corbeil, Vice President and Lead Designer at RVE (Recharge Véhicule Électrique), working on solutions for EV charger installation in multi-unit residential buildings

 

To use progressive summarization with PDFs, here’s what I do:

1. I highlight and comment passages in PDF Expert (which is my layer 1):

 

2. I export my highlights and annotations in text format:

 

Which results in:

 

3. I copy and paste my highlights and annotations into Microsoft OneNote:

 

4. And then I’m ready to go to layer 2, layer 3, and layer 4:

 

Tips and tricks

When doing Layer 3 (highlighted passages), I use gray color instead of yellow because the searching tool in OneNote already uses yellow, which can get confusing when looking for a keyword. So I get:

instead of:

 

When I annotate or comment, I make sure to use asterisks. Otherwise, it’s hard to distinguish the highlights from the annotations once the text is exported:


I do the same when I summarize a passage: I add ((( resume ))) to make it easier to distinguish later on.

Hope this helps

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