LiquidText is much more than a typical PDF reader. While you can, of course, view documents, rearrange pages and add annotations, the app is designed to help you organise and make connections among the most important information in your documents – and even collaborate with others in real time. With cross-device syncing, you can seamlessly move between Mac and iPad versions of LiquidText.

Check out these super-useful features for wrangling your research.

Instead of showing a single document, LiquidText uses a project-based approach that lets you import multiple PDF, Word and PowerPoint documents and display them individually or together in a split-pane view.

But the app goes way beyond reading. To the right of your documents is an infinite, scrollable workspace for notes, annotations and – most important – excerpts: Select text, an image, a chart or other content in a document and drag it into the workspace to create an excerpt; drag it near an existing excerpt to group them.

Workspace getting crowded? LiquidText lets you create additional ones within the same project – for example, to organise notes and excerpts by topic. Give each workspace a custom name and background colour to make it easier to find, and use the Workspace Sidebar (on the right) to arrange and even nest them.

As with the document area, you can display multiple workspaces simultaneously in a split-pane view – then move content between them using drag-and-drop.

LiquidText’s links make it easy to connect and jump among related excerpts, notes, documents and workspaces. Create an “ink link” between content – excerpts in your workspace, charts and text in documents or any combination – by simply drawing a line from one to the other; clicking one end of the line jumps you to the other end, even if one of the items is moved.

Or create a text link to the current workspace: Open the workspace sidebar, click the ⋮ button next to the workspace’s name, and choose Copy Link. You can paste the resulting link into any other workspace; clicking the link switches you to the corresponding workspace.

Pro tip: Drop content onto a text link to move the content into the link’s workspace!

LiquidText performs optical character recognition (OCR) on documents as they’re added to a project, making them searchable even when the original PDFs weren’t. Click the Search button to quickly find text in any of a project’s documents or in your excerpts and notes – LiquidText helpfully highlights all documents and workspaces that contain matches.

You can also add tags to documents, workspaces and excerpts for quick searching.

Pro tip: Pinch with two fingers on your trackpad to show just the sections of a document containing search matches.