Importing a planner PDF into a note-taking app

Importing is easy. The part that confuses people is what happens afterwards, when tapping a tab draws a line instead of navigating.

Importing

GoodNotes. Documents, then the plus button, then Import. Choose the PDF. It becomes a document whose pages are the PDF, and you write on top.

Notability. The plus button on the library screen, then Import, then choose the file. Or open the PDF from Files and use the share sheet.

Noteshelf. Plus, then Import Document.

Samsung Notes. Open the PDF and choose Annotate, or import it from within the app.

Any of them from a browser. Download the file first, then open your notes app and import from Files. Trying to open a PDF directly from a download banner usually lands you in a PDF reader rather than the notes app.

Why tapping draws instead of navigating

This is the single most common thing people report, and it is not a broken file.

In GoodNotes, links only follow when the document is in read-only mode, or when you long-press with a finger. An Apple Pencil tap will always draw, by design: the app assumes a stylus means writing and a finger means navigating.

So: switch to read-only mode to use the tabs, switch back to write. Or use a finger long-press, which works without changing mode.

Notability behaves differently. It shows a small page-number preview before navigating, which is momentarily confusing the first time but is doing the right thing.

What does not work

Worth knowing before assuming a file is faulty.

GoodNotes on Android, Windows and the web does not support hyperlinks in imported PDFs at all. Not a mode you need to find, not a setting. They do not work.

Samsung Notes has widely reported problems with links in longer PDFs, though we have not been able to verify the exact threshold from a primary source.

OneNote does not preserve PDF link annotations on import.

This is exactly why a hyperlinked planner should not depend on its links. Every digital file here also carries a visible week number on every page and a printed index page listing every week with its dates. If the taps do not work on your device, you scroll to a number instead. The links are an enhancement.

Checking whether a file is actually linked

You can check this in a few seconds and it is worth doing, because most free planner PDFs are not linked at all despite the pages advertising them for tablet use.

Open the PDF in any desktop reader and hover over a tab. If the cursor changes to a hand or a pointer, there is a link annotation there. If nothing happens, the tabs are drawings.

Every free weekly planner PDF we inspected while building this site contained zero link annotations, including one whose page mentions a well-known note-taking app twenty-six times.

Page size matters more than people expect

A PDF made for paper has a print margin and a paper aspect ratio, and on a screen both are wrong: you get a white border you cannot use and a page shape that does not match the display.

A digital planner should be full bleed with no print margin, at a page box sized for a tablet. Ours are 810 x 1080 points, which is exactly the logical point size of a 10.2 inch iPad and exactly the 1620 x 2160 pixel canvas the digital planner industry standardised on.

Inside that, there is a safe zone rather than a margin: 32 points at the top to clear the app toolbar, 24 on the tab-rail edge, 20 elsewhere.

Do not print the digital file

It is full bleed and 4:3. A printer will either clip it or letterbox it, and either way the margins are wrong.

Use the print sizes for paper. They are laid out separately for Letter, A4, A5 and Half Letter, not scaled from the digital version.

File size and app performance

Some paid planners run to 1,300 pages and hundreds of megabytes, which is the main cause of the slow scrolling and crashes people report. GoodNotes’ own support guidance for slow PDFs suggests compressing the file or resizing the source document.

A full-year hyperlinked weekly planner does not need to be large. Ours is 65 pages and about 0.22 MB: a cover and index, twelve month overviews, and every week of the year, with over 900 link annotations. Small and fast is a feature rather than a limitation.

e-ink devices

reMarkable, Supernote, Kindle Scribe, Boox and Kobo all support internal PDF links to varying degrees, and all of them respond to a finger tap rather than a stylus, for the same reason as GoodNotes.

One extra consideration: most of these devices reserve bands along the screen edges for their own gestures. A tab sitting under a gesture band is a tab you cannot press, which is why our tab rail is inset at least 24 points from the page edge.