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Work · July 3, 2022

Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

Hey HN! I'm Prajwal, the co-creator of Desklamp! I just completed my undergrad, which is where we got the idea for Desklamp. A bunch of friends and I built this because we hated the experience of studying on our laptops. It was boring, and we found ourselves staring at the screen for hours on end with no output to show for it. To make reading more engaging and to make sure we could remember what we read, we built a note-making system integrated with a PDF reader. The aim is to encourage you to make notes! LaTeX support, clipping out sections from the document, linking notes to sections in…

Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs launched on July 3, 2022 with 99 votes, #317 of 2,916 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.

Visit desklamp.io ↗Alternativestop 11% of July 2022

In plain words

Desklamp is a note-taking system integrated with a PDF reader designed to make studying more engaging. It allows users to annotate documents, support LaTeX formatting, clip sections, and link notes directly to PDF content. The platform includes collaborative features and quality-of-life improvements like light mode and highlight viewing. It targets students and researchers who want a more interactive reading experience with built-in accountability for capturing key information.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Welcome to Desklamp, the new way to read.

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hey HN! I'm Prajwal, the co-creator of Desklamp! I just completed my undergrad, which is where we got the idea for Desklamp. A bunch of friends and I built this because we hated the experience of studying on our laptops. It was boring, and we found ourselves staring at the screen for hours on end with no output to…

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