Annotations

(Invite only beta) Beaver can add highlight and note annotations to PDF attachments in your Zotero library, helping you mark important passages and record insights.

Beaver annotation tool — Beaver can add highlights and notes to your PDFs

Requesting Annotations

Ask Beaver to annotate documents using natural language:

Highlight the key findings in this paper

Add notes explaining the technical terms

Highlight all passages that discuss methodology

Mark the most important quotes with annotations

Identify all definitions of key concepts. Add note annotations to compare them with alternative definitions in my library.

Beaver will identify relevant passages and propose appropriate annotations.

How Annotations Are Applied

Annotations work differently depending on whether the PDF is open:

PDF Status	Behavior
Open in Zotero Reader	Annotations are applied automatically (can be disabled in settings)
Not open	Annotations appear as proposals with a checkmark icon; click to apply or reject

Annotation Types

Highlights mark important text with colored backgrounds. Beaver can use different colors to group related annotations (e.g., blue for methods, green for findings).

Notes add comments, explanations, or questions at specific locations in the document. These are useful for:

Explaining complex concepts in simpler terms
Adding questions to follow up on
Recording your thoughts or connections to other work
Summarizing sections for future reference
Creating relations to other reseach in your library by comparing and contrasting

Under the Hood

Beaver identifies exact text locations using sentence-level indexing from the document processing step. This allows precise highlighting of specific passages. Note annotations are anchored to specific sentences but can contain any content you'd like to record at that location.