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# Listen to dense PDFs without losing footnotes

Textbooks and monographs pack citations, side comments, and long footnotes. Hearing them in the wrong order can confuse you more than silence would. Trellis lets you tune what the voice reads so the audio matches your study mode.

## Two listening modes

Clean pass: Skip footnotes and front matter when you want narrative flow. Use this for a first listen or when you need mileage on a long chapter.

Full pass: Keep footnotes and marginalia when you are prepping for an exam that pulls from citations. Expect slower audio and more interruptions. That is the point.

## Practical tips

1. Bookmark the first page of the main text so playback does not restart in the copyright screen.
2. If a table is read cell by cell, switch to visual mode for that spread, then return to audio.
3. Pair listening with a question in Celeste about a footnote you almost skipped, as in reading PDFs with Celeste.

Mobile playback may still be in beta for your account. If something sounds clipped, report the file name through support links on the site.

## When citations matter

Law, history, and graduate seminars often grade how you handle notes and apparatus. In those courses, run a full pass at least once so you hear where the author hides qualifications inside a footnote. If the voice mispronounces a proper noun, fix it in your own notes rather than trusting audio alone on names that will appear on a final paper.

## Pairing audio with short written drills

After a clean pass, write five bullet points from memory, then compare them to the text. If bullets drift, rerun the tricky pages in visual mode. Cross-link this habit with voice or text studying when you plan a long exam week.