Pictures, files and links

Keep everything about a plan in one note: the receipt, the floor plan, the booking confirmation and the link to the venue. Varlig copies what you add into your library, so the note keeps working even if you move or delete the original.

Add pictures and files

Drag an image, PDF or any other file into a note, or choose Format › Attach Files… (⇧⌘V). Varlig adds it at the end of the note.
Paste a picture you’ve copied, such as a screenshot, and it goes in at the cursor.

Each file can be up to 100 MB. In the Markdown, a picture is written ![name](assets/…) and any other file [name](assets/…), pointing at the copy in your library.

Work with pictures

Resize: drag the handle at a picture’s bottom-right corner. Right-click for Original Image Size or Fit Image to Editor. Your original picture is never changed.
Look closer: select a picture and press Space to preview it.
Remove: put the cursor next to a picture and press Delete to remove it in one go.

PDFs, audio and video

A PDF shows a preview of its first page. Double-click it to read the whole document, or right-click to hide or show the preview.
Audio, video and animated GIFs play without leaving the note.
Double-click any other file to open it in its own app.

Mark up a PDF

Open a PDF and choose Annotate. Select text in the page, then Highlight, Underline or Strikeout; typing in the field and pressing Add Note leaves a note beside the passage. Undo and Redo step through the marks one press at a time.

Save Annotated Copy adds “Name (annotated).pdf” to the note as a new attachment. The PDF you started from is never written to — it stays byte for byte as it was — so marking up is always safe to try. The marks use the PDF format’s own annotations, so any other reader shows them.

In a password-protected note the copy is sealed like every other attachment, and nothing decrypted is written to disk along the way. A password-protected PDF can’t be marked up, and Varlig says so rather than appearing to work.

Mark up a picture

An image attachment has the same Annotate button. Drag across the picture to add a Highlight, a Box or an Arrow, and Add Note writes a short note where you drag. Save Annotated Copy adds the marked-up picture to the note as a new attachment and leaves the original exactly as it was.

One difference from a PDF: a picture has no annotation layer, so the marks are painted into the copy. They can’t be taken out again afterwards, and the copy is always saved as a PNG whatever the original was. Animated GIFs aren’t offered annotation, since flattening an animation to a single frame isn’t what the button promises.

Record audio into a note

Note › Record Audio… opens a small panel with a timer and an input level, and adds the recording to the note when you press Finish. Pause and Resume are there if you’re interrupted, and Cancel… discards the audio after asking.

Varlig saves the recording in parts every 30 seconds, so a crash, a quit or a flat battery keeps what was already recorded. Next time you open Varlig it offers Recordings to Recover, where you can attach a recovered recording to a note, save it as a new note, or discard it.

The first recording asks macOS for permission to use the microphone. A recording stops at three hours, and Varlig checks there’s at least 200 MB free before it starts.

Mark a passage while you record

Note › Add Recording Marker (⌃⌘M) drops the current recording time into the note at the cursor, so you can mark the moment something was said while you type alongside it. Clicking a marker later plays the recording from there.

A marker is an ordinary Markdown link whose label is the time:

The budget is settled[0:45](assets/2B5C….m4a) and the date slips.

Because it sits inside the sentence it belongs to, it moves with that sentence: type above it, delete around it, reopen the note or sync it, and it still points at the same words and the same moment. Any other Markdown reader sees a plain link to the recording.

If you delete the passage a marker was in, Varlig keeps the marker the way it keeps a comment that loses its anchor: the note’s info popover lists it under Detached Recording Markers, where you can put it back at the cursor or discard it. Undo brings the passage and its marker back together.

Find text in pictures and PDFs

Varlig recognises the text in pictures and PDFs you add, on your Mac. Search finds it like any other text, so you can find a receipt by a word printed on it. Add @ocr to a search to look only in recognised text.

Your iPhone and iPad read the pictures, scans and PDFs you add there too, and with iCloud sync on, the text they read comes to your Mac with the note, and the other way round. See New notes, scans, photos and sharing.

Put the text in the note

Extract Text… copies the words out of a PDF or picture into the note, where you can edit them. It’s a button in the attachment’s preview window, and an item in the right-click menu of its preview in the note and of its link.

A sheet shows the text before anything changes. A PDF’s own text is used wherever a page has some; only pages without it, and pictures, are read by text recognition, and the sheet says which, as in 3 pages from the PDF’s own text, 2 pages recognized from the page images. Lines the recognition wasn’t sure of are highlighted.

Insert puts the text below the attachment as plain paragraphs, in one undo step. Each doubtful line ends in (?), so a search for (?) finds the lines to check. Text that would turn into a tag, a heading, a code block or a line is escaped so it stays as written, and lists stay lists. Tables and columns come through as lines of text rather than being rebuilt.

In a protected note the file is read in memory and the text is sealed with the note. A read-only note, a note in the Trash or a locked note can’t take the text, and Varlig says why.

Sketches and generated images

Format › Sketch… opens a drawing pad for a quick diagram or doodle. A sketch can’t be reopened for editing later, so draw a new one to change it.
Format › Image Playground… appears on Macs with macOS 15.1 or later where Apple’s Image Playground is available.

Web links

Press ⌘K to add a link. Enter a Title and URL, and choose Done. Press ⇧⌘K to open the link under the cursor.

When you paste a web address on its own, Varlig fetches the page’s title and makes a tidy link from it. Paste an address over selected text and that text becomes the link. To keep pasted addresses as they are, turn off Auto-fill titles when pasting web links in Settings › General.

In the Markdown, a link is [title](https://example.com). The brackets stay hidden unless you select the link, and a pencil button beside it opens the link editor.