Incremental Reading

Obsidian plugin that enables incremental reading, a powerful, low-friction workflow for learning from texts.

It combines spaced repetition using FSRS and a priority-based queuing system to allow users to:

• Easily build understanding through a divide-and-conquer approach that provides repeated exposures to learning material.
• Learn several subjects in parallel without having to manually schedule and keep track of their progress.
• Retain what they've learned indefinitely with spaced repetition cards.

Since this is integrated directly into Obsidian, your learning materials, snippets, and cards live alongside or even within your notes, making it convenient to work with all kinds of information.

For technical details, see terminology and how incremental reading works in this plugin.

Setup

1. Installation

In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins → enable community plugins if you haven't already → Browse → search for "incremental reading" → install and enable.

2. Configure Obsidian Sync

If you don't use Sync, skip this step.

Go to Settings → Sync → enable Sync all other types. Repeat this on each device.

[!warning] Sync will overwrite the plugin's database if you use the plugin on a second device before enabling Sync all other types.

You can easily recover the database if this happens: open the Files pane → find incremental-reading/ir-user-data and right-click (on mobile, tap and hold until it lights up) → select Open version history → select the newest version from your first device → select Restore.

If you don't see the user data file, you may need to enable Settings → Files and Links → Show all file types.

Use the plugin

1. In the vault, open a note, a PDF, or a webpage in the web viewer that you want to learn from.

2. Run Import article from the command palette to save it to your study queue. Set a lower priority (for example, 1.5) if you want to review it frequently. See Priority scheduling for more details.

[!tip] You can also import from the More options menu (three dots in the upper-right corner of a tab), or by right-clicking on a file in the Files sidebar view and selecting Import article.

3. Set aside some time for a study session each day, depending on how much you want to learn. Even 10 minutes is fine!

Study sessions

Once you've imported some material, begin a study session by selecting the Incremental reading button in the left ribbon (or perform Incremental Reading: Learn from the command palette).

1. The first item in the queue will be shown to you. Read as much as you like, extracting interesting or important passages to snippets as you go.
2. Select Mark reviewed when you want to move on to the next item. Don't worry about losing track of the active item; it will be shown to you again in the future.

[!tip] If you don't want to see an item again, select Dismiss from future review instead.

3. Cards you've made will appear in review on subsequent days. Mentally fill in the blank or answer the question, then show the answer. Grade yourself per these criteria.

[!warning] For spaced repetition to work properly, make sure you're actually attempting to recall the answer before revealing it.

Revise snippets

You may find the phrasing of a snippet can be improved by revising wording, removing fluff, etc. This is a key step in incremental reading.

[!tip] Wait until it's obvious what changes you want to make, and limit yourself to one simple revision per repetition.

Make cards

Once a snippet has been sufficiently trimmed down and revised, it's ready to be turned into one or more spaced repetition cards.

Cards should ideally be one or two sentences and have only one correct answer. The shorter the better, as long as it remains clear how to answer them.

There are two ways to create cards:

Quick-create

Select the portion of a block that you want to be the answer, and run Create spaced repetition card. The entire paragraph or list item containing the selected text will be extracted to the card. Split paragraphs or list items up as needed.

Two-step

You can also create cards spanning multiple blocks, or from a portion of a block.

1. While in review, select Create card on the action bar (or run Create spaced repetition card) before selecting any text.
2. Select what you want to include in the card and select Confirm (or run Create spaced repetition card again).
3. A modal will appear showing what you selected. Select the answer within it and press Enter.

Grade cards

After showing the answer for a card, you'll have four grades to choose from. To see how long until the card comes back with each grade, such as 10m or 4d, turn on Show intervals on grade buttons in the plugin's settings.

Choose:

• Easy if you recalled the correct answer immediately
• Good if the correct answer came to you fairly quickly, but not effortlessly
• Hard if you were able to recall roughly the correct answer, but it took time and effort
• Forgot if you didn't recall the answer

Other workflows

Snippets and cards can be created from any note, so don't feel limited to only doing this during study sessions. Note: this is currently disabled in reading mode.

This is especially handy for:

• Notes that only have one passage you want to learn from, which you can extract into a snippet directly instead of importing the whole note.
• Notes that are well-structured for direct conversion into cards, such as lists of atomic, self-contained information.

Bulk imports

Import many selected files and folders (or the contents of a folder) by right clicking on them in the Files view and selecting Import n items... or Import from folder..., respectively.

[!tip] Select many files in the Files view with Alt-click (Option-click on macOS), or Shift-click to select a range of files.

Alternatively, click Bulk import... on the review home screen to select files by folder, frontmatter tags, or search.

To undo a bulk import, use Undo last action, right-click on a folder and select Un-import from folder, or open the more options menu in the top right of the review home screen and select Bulk un-import...

Automatic imports

To import everything that arrives in a folder (for example, a Web Clipper inbox), enable Auto-import files added to folders and list the folders under Watched folders. Notes and PDFs created, moved, or synced into those folders or their subfolders will become articles.

[!NOTE] Files already in a folder before it is watched will not be auto-imported.

Notes are also imported when certain tags are added to their frontmatter (by default, just #ir-import). Add more under Trigger tags in the plugin's settings as desired, or turn off this behavior.

For example, adding #clippings auto-imports pages saved by Obsidian Web Clipper.

[!NOTE] This does not check for tags in note bodies.

More guides

• A short guide to incremental reading
• How to make good cards: 20 rules of knowledge formulation
• The complete (and long) guide to incremental reading in SuperMemo

Known limitations and issues

• Creating snippets and cards on partial code blocks, blockquotes, LaTeX, and other types of special formatting can break the formatting. It is recommended to include the entire formatted section (such as the entire code block) when making the snippet or card, and then editing it afterwards as desired.
• Reading mode is not fully supported. Some features are disabled or don't work as intended.

PDFs

• If a PDF article is moved while Obsidian is closed, it loses its snippet and card highlights, Go to context won't work, and importing the PDF won't pick them up.
• For security reasons, invisible characters in a PDF's text such as zero-width spaces, soft hyphens, and text direction controls, are left out when making snippets and cards. For reverse-direction lines in PDFs, drag-select past the line's end to take all of it.
• A snippet or card that runs onto the next page is highlighted up to the end of its first page.
• A scanned PDF has no text to select, so nothing can be made from it.

Third-party tools

• Obsidian Web Clipper to save webpages from your browser to your vault, from the Obsidian team. This is also built into Obsidian's web viewer; just select the overflow menu in the upper-right corner and select Save to vault.
• MarkDownload browser addon for saving pages. On some sites, this works better than Obsidian Web Clipper.
• PDF24 converter is a convenient tool to convert PDF to Markdown, but it's likely to leave spaces where lines wrapped in the PDF.
• Marker is another PDF converter that might work better.

Terminology

• SRS: Spaced Repetition System.
• Review: includes both your first exposure to learning material and subsequent re-visits.
• Article: any learning material you've imported.
• Snippet: a section of text you have extracted.
• Card: a question and answer entry that is scheduled using the spaced repetition algorithm.
• Item: an article, snippet, or card.
• Source: an external note that (1) an article was imported from, or (2) a snippet or card was made from.
• Parent: the item that a snippet or card is made from.
• Self-contained: understandable by itself. This is vital for cards, which must have a unique and clear prompt for the spaced repetition algorithm to work as expected.
• Atomic: cannot be simplified without loss of meaning. Cards should be as atomic as possible. See atomic memory.

How incremental reading works in this plugin

During study sessions, articles, snippets, and cards that are due will be presented to you, interleaved with each other.

Imported articles are due immediately. New snippets are scheduled to be reviewed in one day.

When making a card, its content will be embedded into its original location, so it can still be useful within its original note.

Cards are scheduled using the FSRS algorithm.

There are two scheduling methods available for articles and snippets: priority-based scheduling and fixed-interval scheduling.

The default priority-based system is generally recommended, but fixed intervals can work better for long texts (like if you import an entire book as a single "article") or if you're studying for a deadline less than 3–4 weeks out.

Priority scheduling

In this approach, items are scheduled for review using intervals that lengthen on each review, starting from one day. Priorities control how quickly these intervals grow.

Priorities range from 1 to 5, where 1 means intervals grow extremely slowly, while 5 means each interval will be approximately 1.6 times the length of the previous one.

[!tip] Use decimal priorities for fine-grained control. You can simply enter a two-digit number from 10 to 50. The decimal point will be inserted automatically.

Reducing priority will not make future intervals shorter; it only slows the growth.

Don't worry if setting priorities feels unintuitive at first. You'll develop a feel for it with practice.

Fixed-interval scheduling

Articles can be configured to be reviewed on a fixed interval (e.g., daily or weekly) instead of using the priority system. Use the Manage item scheduling command to change the scheduling method.

Plugin data

To avoid side effects, this plugin does not modify files outside its data folder, with one exception: it adds a source tag to note frontmatter when you make snippets from them.

Plugin data (items and the SQLite database) is stored in the incremental-reading/ folder.

Files are imported in-place unless you turn on Make a copy in the import dialog (or the Copy articles when importing setting), which puts a copy in the plugin data folder. You can delete the original after that if you no longer need it. Automatic imports are always in-place.

When you make a snippet or card, a new note is created in the plugin data folder to hold its content.

The SQLite database stores scheduling data, FSRS parameters for cards, and repetition history.