How Marian works

Any text on any page. A phrase is enough — you do not need to select a whole paragraph to remember one.

A small toolbar appears next to your selection. Colours are yours to mean whatever you like; you can name them in settings so “yellow” becomes “disagree with this”.

Click the highlight and type. Notes are the most valuable thing in your library — when you later ask a question, passages you wrote something about are treated as stronger evidence than ones you did not.

Open the side panel to see everything from this page, or the library to see everything from everywhere.

Click the star in the side panel. Useful for something you want to return to but have not read yet.

Collections are folders for pages. Give one a colour and it becomes scannable in a long list.

From the page’s row in the side panel or the library. A page lives in one collection; its highlights come along with it.

Tags work across collections, so a single passage can belong to a project and a theme at once.

From the web app’s menu, or the + PDF button in the extension’s side panel. It opens here because Chrome cannot read a file you have not explicitly chosen.

The text is pulled out in this browser tab. The file itself never leaves your machine — Marian keeps the words, not the document.

You will see it count through. A long book takes a moment; the count is there so you know it is working rather than stuck.

Go to Ask. Answers drawn from a PDF tell you the page they came from, so you can go and check.

The page you are on appears at the top as a card, with its picture and a line or two about it.

A short account of what the page actually argues — the claims, not the topics — and who it is useful to. This is for deciding whether to spend the next twenty minutes on it.

A reminder of what you kept and what your notes said about it, including where your notes disagreed with the passage. It is greyed out until you have highlighted something, because until then there is nothing to recall.

The summary is saved on the page and shows as a single line in your library afterwards. Click to unfold it. Redo it any time — the new one replaces the old.

Click a highlight and choose Ask. The conversation stays attached to that passage, so months later the thinking you did is still there beside it.

The Ask tab searches your whole library. Every claim in the answer points at the passage it came from.

Turn on Synthesise for a connected account across several passages — including where they disagree and what is missing.

They are the point. If an answer cannot cite your library, it says so rather than filling the gap with something it made up.

The button sits beside Like and Share. It captures wherever the playhead is, so you do not have to pause or scrub back.

Open the side panel and add your note, the same as any highlight. The note is the part that matters — the timestamp only tells you where to go back to.

A video moment sits in the same library as a passage from an article, and turns up in the same searches and the same answers.

It opens the video at that exact second — in the tab you already have open, if there is one.

It shows tabs that have been open more than a day. Anything newer is a tab you are still using, so it stays out of the way.

If you highlighted something on that page before, it says so — “you highlighted 3 things here in March”. That is usually the fact that decides what to do with it.

Saving puts the page in your library so you can close the tab without losing it. Snoozing hides it for a week and leaves the tab open.

There are no notifications and no badges counting at you. The list is there when you go looking and silent when you do not.

Every tab in the window is saved to your library and then closed. They are only closed once every one has been saved.

If you have highlights on pages in the queue, it says so. That is usually the one you should open first.

Clicking it reopens the page and takes it off the queue.

Highlight anything on a queued page and it leaves the queue — you read it. That is what stops the list becoming a monument to good intentions.

It looks only at marks that are not in a collection yet. Anything you already filed is a decision you made, and it is left alone.

Three quotes from the group. You can tell in seconds whether they belong together — that judgement is yours, not the software’s.

Type a name, or spend a credit to have one suggested. Nothing is created until you press the button.

Dismissed suggestions never come back.

Every page you visit — the address, the title, and how long you were actually there. Not what the page said. It is a browsing history, and it syncs with your account.

Under “Record how long I spend on pages”. Sites Marian is blocked on — anything that looks like banking or health — are never timed at all.

The web app’s Reading time page leads with the number that matters: how much you read, and how much of it you kept something from.

One button, and your highlights are untouched. Everything older than 90 days is deleted automatically anyway.

On a signup or checkout page with a terms link, it offers to read it. It never opens anything on its own.

The document opens in a background tab under your own session — which is the only way it works behind a login — and closes again.

Every point quotes the clause it came from, so you can check it. That is the whole design: a confident wrong summary of a contract is worse than no summary.

If the agreement points at another document, or a section is vague, it says so. It is a reading aid, not legal advice.

Highlighting, notes, collections, search, and adding a PDF never cost anything. Rationing the thing the library is for would make no sense.

A question about a passage costs 1. A question to your whole library costs 2. A synthesis costs 3. The price is shown on the button before you press it.

There is no background summarising and no automatic AI. Every credit is spent by a click you made.

If a generation breaks, the credit comes back. You can see every charge on your account page.

The same account, and your highlights follow you. Sync is optional; Marian works entirely offline without it.

Markdown, JSON or CSV, from the account page or the extension.

That is why this web app exists. Uninstalling should never be the thing that loses your reading.

Delete your account and everything goes — highlights, conversations, document text, and the search index built from them.