Marqed Beta: Feature Lineup

I present to you the new toolbar for Marqed Beta!  A few steps closer to the best PDF reading and highlighting tool online.

Highlight - We've got highlight working perfectly now.  All you do is select the first word you want to highlight and drag to the last word.  Bam, it's awesome, and it's what we use the most when we're reading.

Margin Notes - Finally, I know.  Easier said than done, but they're working perfectly.  Hit the button on the toolbar or the 'W' key on your keyboard, then click on the page for the box to snap to it, and begin writing.  (This feature gets very very useful because of Search, which I have yet to describe, but it's oh so good).

Bookmark - You can't exactly fold the edge of the page of a PDF document, so we've created Bookmarks for our users to tag a page or section with a brief phrase to describe it.  Think of Margin Notes as a full sentence or two while Bookmarks are really the two word "anchor".  You'll be able to Search across all your documents for both.

Copy Text - We've had a lot of people request the ability to easily copy a passage from what they're reading and paste it to another application, like a Word Processor to cite in a paper.  It's really easy to do so with Marqed, it works exactly the same as a highlight, but instead of turning the passage yellow, it pastes the text to your computer's clip board, so all you have to do is go over to your word processor or email or whatever and paste it.  This makes citing papers way faster, and we have even more ideas about future improvements on this simple but very useful function!  I'm geeking out about it.  Good stuff.

Erase - It's ALSO like highlight but instead of turning a blank passage yellow it turns a yellow passage blank!  We've changed the functionality to a click and drag instead of a click, this way you can erase specific words within a highlight instead of deleting the whole thing.  It's working great.

Zoom - So the biggest thing James and I sought to improve for our Beta was the document page image quality.  When we put your documents into our tool, they were less than perfect.  Well, that  was the first thing we got done and it's so so much better, it's amazing.  Zoom to your heart's content.  I mean really zoom in, and it's as gorgeous, no loss of quality from half the size of the original document to four times the original size.  It will look perfect on your netbook and on your 24 inch wide-screen computer monitor--it is so so much better looking.  Happy

Save - Hey, this is a super important feature so don't forget it!  Every time you click the save button or change a page, we're saving your notes for you.  And every 2 minutes, we're doing it again just in case you stepped away for a second and there's an earthquake or something crazy like that.

Undo - Boom, works on everything, so if you highlight something, undo it, you erase part of a highlight, undo it, you make a bookmark, undo it, margin note, undo it.  You get the idea.

Print - Heyo!  New awesome feature.  Hit print, we'll ask what pages you want, and you can print them out!  Part of the point of Marqed is to help people without printers or people who don't want to print/green nerds like me, so please keep in mind that you probably could get away without printing it up.  Try, at the very least, to only print a few pages.  But hey, now you can.

Rotate - I'd have never guessed so many people suggested this feature, but there you go, rotate your documents at will!  And also, if you do have an idea for Marqed, suggest it right now, it takes you like 15 seconds and it helps us sooooooo much.

Expect a new post soon about the different Tabs we've created for you to navigate through Marqed with specific detail to the new Search and Outline tabs.  Also going to make Marqed better and better.

Thanks to everyone who's been with us so far, it's very exciting.  Never thought I'd spend so much time thinking about (digital) reading and note-taking.   Cheers.

-Denny