Polar Documentation
‘Add to Polar’ Button for Easily Adding Documents to Polar Polar supports a feature to allow allow any users to add a document to Polar simply by clicking on a link / button. The interesting part is that it supports any PDF document on the web that’s publicly accessible. Here’s a button that links to the Bitcoin Whitepaper. Add to Polar Here’s what it looks like when rendered in the user’s browser. This allows for...
Anki and Spaced Repetition Polar supports native integration with Anki via the Polar Connect add-on. This allows for annotations on document and connecting flashcards to these annotations and then synchronizing them directly to Anki. Polar supports a robust annotation system internally with features like text and area highlights, and allowing comments and flashcards to be attached directly to the highlights. This allows you to create flashcards but keep context associated with the flashcards. The context...
Annotation Sidebar
The annotation sidebar in Polar shows a list of highlights, comments and
flashcards associated with a specific document.
This allows you to create, edit, and delete annotations for a specific document
and view all annotations in one central location.
Bulk Import Polar allows you to bulk import one or more PDFs from a directory on you local disk and imports them into your repository. If you have cloud sync enabled they’re automatically imported into the cloud. Multiple files can be imported by selecting more than one. Metadata We attempt to extract metadata from the PDF - specifically the document title. If no metadata is available we revert to the filename as the title (including...
Cloud Sync Polar supports synchronizing the storage of your documents and annotations (known as our datastore) with the cloud and synchronizing data across computers. Cloud sync is near real-time and actively pushes updates to your other devices so that when you change computers your documents are already up to date - no waiting (assuming your computer is active at the time). Backed by Firebase Polar cloud sync is backed by Google’s Firebase. You can read...
Device Sync Polar supports two main types of data sync to keep your data transferred and synchronized between your devices - git sync and cloud sync. If you’re only using your local machine you don’t really need to use device sync. IF you have a laptop, desktop, or work machine, and routinely go back and forth then using device sync might be for you. 3rd Party Sync DO NOT use a 3rd party sync framework...
How do I support Polar? We have an Open Collective setup to allow donations. How do I import my existing data? If you have a large number of PDF files that you would like to import you can select File | Import and select multiple files and they will all be imported into your repository. This process is fairly quick taking about 1 minute per 100-200MB. Where is my data kept? Your data is kept...
Folders Polar supports folders for managing your files in a hierarchy. We support both basic tags and ‘hierarchical’ tags. To create a hierarchical tag, prefix the tag with a /. Example: /my/custom/hierarchy. Once you tag a document with a hierarchical tag a folder will be created in the sidebar. Regular tags are shown in the document to the right of the document title and hierarchical tags are shown in the left pane/sidebar. Creating folders Folders...
Git Sync Polar supports synchronizing the storage of your documents and annotations (known as your datastore) with git. Polar just stores JSON files directly and the underlying PDFs are immutable. We still recommend using cloud sync for most users as it supports a much greater feature set and is vastly easier to use. However, if you’re already familiar with git, it’s nice to have a secondary backup. Additionally, git sync allows you to diff and...
Incremental Reading (Pagemarks and Tracking Progress) Incremental reading is a strategy around suspending and resuming reading of a document over time. Reading the documents in chunks and coming back to the document at any future point in time. Wikipedia has a good overview of incremental reading Incremental reading is a software-assisted method for learning and retaining information from reading, helping with the creation of flashcards out of electronic articles read in portions inside a prioritized...
# Key Bindings for Common Polar Operations ## Document Repository ```delete``` Delete the current document ## Document Viewer ||Finish tag input||```Control-Enter```||Will finish a tag input and select all the tags.|| ||Complete Annotation||```Control-Enter```||Finishes an annotation and saves it to Polar. This includes flashcards and comments.|| ||Toggle Sidebar||```F10```||Toggles the sidebar view when using the document viewer. The sidebar shows annotations in a 'tree view' including comments and flashcards.|| ||Full Screen||``F11``||Enables full screen mode|| ||Cancel||```escape```||Most components support ```Escape```...
# Sharing and Collaboration Polar supports sharing files with other users and commenting and sharing annotations and comments allow you to collaborate with groups. In order to share a document open the document and click on the 'share' button in the sidebar. At this point a new dialog will open up. Enter the users email to invite them to the document. You should use their primary Polar email address. They will then receive a popup...
# Tracking Policy Polar uses Google Analytics and other 3rd party services to track your usage of Polar for quality assurance, UI/UX and usability issues, fault detection, and adoption and usage of new features. Our *only* goal for tracking is to improve the quality of the application. We are *not* interested in tracking the actual content of the books you read, the annotations, you create, etc. We would consider this a bug and revert any...
# Web Page Capture Polar supports long term web page archival via a process called "capture" which downloads and caches the content locally. We store it in Polar as if it were any other type of document (like PDF). This allows you to manage web pages with tags and annotations including text and area highlights, comments, and flashcards. This essentially allows Polar to work like your own personal Internet archive for documents critical to your...