The full user manual

1. How Voynich is organised

Voynich is a program that runs on your own Windows PC or Mac and shows its pages in your web browser. Nothing is stored online: there is no account and no server of ours. The pieces fit together like this:

The hall and every room have the same tabs along the top: Home, Library, Writing, Notes, Flashcards, Stats (with the sessions inside it) and Circles, and AI in a room when the AI is on. The room they show is named at the start of the bar: click it to choose another room (or the hall), and you stay on the same tab, so Notes in one room opens Notes in the other. At the end of the bar are the search and the gear, Settings: one page, the same in the hall and in every room (see Settings). In the hall, Library has every room’s books too, Stats is the hall and all your rooms together, and Flashcards shows what is due in each room. In this manual, “Settings, Privacy” means the Privacy tab of that page. The same menu has the closed rooms under their own heading, and New room. On a narrow window the tabs show only their icons (point at one for its name); on a phone they are in a bar at the bottom (see On the phone).

The bar of pages along the top gets out of the way while you read down a page: it slides up as you scroll down, and comes back when you move the pointer to the top edge of the window, when you scroll back to the top, when you Tab into it, or (on a phone) when you scroll up. A document’s own buttons and toolbar move up into its place and back. At its start is the room menu (the name of the room you are in: pick the hall or another room there, or make a new one; the tab you are on stays). At its end are Search everything (the magnifier, or Ctrl+K: books, notes, documents, cards, sessions and settings, from anywhere), Guide (the ?, below) and Settings (the gear). On a phone the tabs move to a bar at the bottom, with More for the ones that do not fit.

The guide. This manual is inside Voynich too, as its guide, the same text, so it works without the internet. Guide, the ? at the end of the top bar (beside the search and Settings, on every page and on a phone too) has two choices: Guide to this page opens the guide at the part about the page you are on (in Settings, at the tab that is open), and What is this? lets you point at things: while it is on, a button, tab or box you press is not pressed but explained, with the line of the guide that names it and a link to that part. Press as many as you like, then Done or Esc. With the keyboard, Tab to a control and press Enter. The guide has its own search, and its contents beside it. (The ? key still shows the keyboard shortcuts.)

Settings (the gear) is one page, the same in the hall and in every room, in tabs: General (the start page), Look (themes, text size, fonts), Study (break reminders, Stats’ colours), Flashcards, Reading (the reader’s pages, text boxes, the notes beside a book, what each highlight colour means, the Library, book search), Writing, Notes (note cards, the graph), AI, Circles and phone, Data, Privacy, Shortcuts, About and updates and This room (a room’s courses, activities, name, symbol and goals, closing or deleting it). This room and Flashcards are about one room: the room you are in, or another chosen at the top. Search the settings, above the tabs, finds a setting by its words (“font” finds the text size and the theme’s fonts) and opens its tab at it; the search of everything (Ctrl+K) finds settings too. Each part says where it is kept: This browser only (a phone and the computer can differ, such as the reader’s pages or the text size), Every browser you use, or one room only. Settings you meet where you use them (the reader’s menus, Flashcards’ menu, Writing’s Paper button, the timer’s bell) stay there too and change the same setting. On a phone, Settings shows the list of tabs first and one tab at a time.

Where Voynich opens. Settings, General, Start page: the hall (as before), the room you used last, or always one room. A room that is closed or deleted opens the hall instead.

2. Installing, starting, quitting

Installing

Download Voynich-Setup.exe and open it. Windows may say “Windows protected your PC” because the program is not signed with a paid certificate: choose More info, then Run anyway. Setup installs for your user only and needs no administrator rights. It offers a Desktop shortcut and adds Voynich to the Start menu. Voynich works on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), and on macOS 11 or newer (below); there is no Linux version yet.

Install on a Mac

Download Tracker-Mac.dmg (one download for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, macOS 11 or newer), open it, and drag Tracker onto the Applications folder. On a Mac it keeps the old name, Tracker, for now: the same version as on Windows, with everything this manual describes, under the old name (and its data folder keeps it too). It is not signed with a paid Apple certificate, so macOS stops it the first time, once:

• macOS 15 (Sequoia) and newer: open Tracker, close the message, then open System Settings, Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security and press Open Anyway next to the line about Tracker, and confirm. The button is there for about an hour after the message.
• macOS 11 to 14 (Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma): Control-click (or right-click) Tracker in the Applications folder, choose Open, then Open again.

After that it opens like any app, and updates from inside Voynich do not ask again. On a Mac, Voynich’s icon is a small clock in the menu bar at the top right (it has no Dock icon); click it to open Voynich, Control-click it for its menu. Your data is in ~/Library/Application Support/Tracker/data and the log in ~/Library/Application Support/Tracker/logs/tracker.log. To remove it, quit it and drag Tracker to the Trash; the data folder stays until you delete it.

Starting

Start Voynich from the Start menu or the Desktop shortcut (on a Mac, from the Applications folder). It runs quietly in the background with no window of its own, opens in your default browser, and puts a small icon near the clock (if you cannot see it, click the little arrow next to the clock). Click the icon to open Voynich in the browser; right-click it for Open Voynich, Show the log folder and Quit Voynich. Starting Voynich a second time just opens the first one.

The address in the browser is http://localhost:3417 (or a nearby number if that one is busy). It works only on your computer: no other device on your network can open it, unless you turn on Use Voynich from your phone and pair a phone (see Your phone).

Quitting

Right-click the icon (Control-click on a Mac) and choose Quit Voynich, or press Quit Voynich in Settings, About and updates. Closing the browser tab does not stop Voynich, and a running timer is kept (it lives in your browser, see The timer).

Removing it

On a Mac, drag Voynich to the Trash (see above). On Windows: Windows Settings, Apps, Installed apps, Voynich, Uninstall. It asks whether to delete your data as well; the default is No, so installing Voynich again later carries on where you left off.

3. Rooms

The first time you open Voynich you see the welcome page.

• Start with your own room. Choose A language I am learning, My studies (courses or a degree), Research or a thesis or Something else. Each comes with sensible activities and a symbol you can change later. Then name it, say what each part is called (one word, like Course, Language or Topic) and optionally type your first ones separated by commas. Create my room makes it.
• Try it with sample data. Adds a made-up semester: three courses, four weeks of sessions, nine linked notes (some written under others), two books and goals. A slim line at the top of its pages says it is sample data and has Remove sample data, which takes only the sample away (a copy of your data is saved first).
• I already have a copy of my data. Opens the restore and import options, for a copy or export from another computer (see Backups, exports, moving).

Your first room (your own or the sample) opens with a short tour: four cards on rooms and the timer, notes and the graph, books and the reader, and Writing. Next and Back go through it, Skip or Esc closes it, and it is not shown again; Settings, About and updates has take the short tour again.

More rooms: press New room at the bottom of the room menu (the room’s name at the start of the top bar). Changing one: Settings, This room (with the room chosen at its top), lets you change its symbol (an icon chosen from a set, which also shows in the room menu and on the hall’s Home) and name, what each part is called, its daily goal, and its order in the room menu. Closing one you are done with (last term’s): Close this room in the same place. It leaves the room menu’s rooms for Closed rooms under them and has no door on the hall’s Home; nothing in it is deleted, its time stays in Stats and your streak, and it is not offered as a place to move things to. Tick Put its books and documents on a shelf of the hall to find them from the hall too, on a shelf named after the room. A closed room says so at the top of its pages; Open it again in its settings brings it back. Deleting one: Delete this room in the same place. Voynich shows what will be removed (sessions, courses, activities, notes and books), and if the room holds any sessions, notes or books it asks you to type the room’s name before Delete permanently works. A copy of your data is saved first (“Before a delete” in the list of saved copies).

4. Courses and activities

Both are managed in the room’s own Settings, in the lists at the top. You can add, rename, recolour and delete them, and drag the grip (or focus it and use the arrow keys) to put them in the order you like.

Courses

• Weekly goal: hours per week. It becomes a progress bar on the room’s Home.
• Deadline: a day of its own (an exam, a hand-in) and what it is called (“Final exam”). Home counts down to it under Coming up (see Home). Empty the date to take it away.
• Total goal: hours in all, with an optional finish date. Home then shows how far along you are and, with a date, how many hours a week it takes to finish in time.
• Passive: a passive course is left out of Home’s weekly goals list (for example something you only follow loosely). Its time and goals are kept.
• The colour you pick is used in lists, charts, notes and the graph.
• Each course has its own page: click its name wherever it appears (Home’s goals, a book’s course, a note’s course, Stats, or Open in Settings). It shows the course’s time this week and in all, its books with their progress, its notes, its documents and its latest sessions, each leading on to where it lives.

Activities

Each has a name, a colour and an icon (pick the icon from the pictures). Add the ones you actually use; an activity can be used with any course.

5. Home

• Timer: see the next section.
• Coming up: the deadlines of the room, the nearest first: a course’s Deadline (in Settings) and the day a document is due (Due, under Page in Writing), with how far off each is (“in 12 days”; red once it has passed, shown for a week after). For a course it works out what a day needs until then, counting the days before the deadline itself: the pages left in its books that are not finished and have a page count, the minutes left of its total goal, and its flashcards (of its notes and books) due by then. For a document it shows the words so far. The card is not there when there are no deadlines.
• Reading now: the books you have marked as Reading, with the page you are on and an estimate of how long is left. Continue reading opens a book that has its file where you stopped. A book with a day to finish it by (Finish by) says how many pages a day that takes.
• Week in review: on Sundays and Mondays a small card leads to the week in review in Stats (on a Sunday the week ending that day, on a Monday the week just over).
• Flashcards due: how many of your flashcards are due, with Review (shown only when some are).
• Today: time logged today against the daily goal, your streak (days in a row with time logged, in any room) and a calendar of your last weeks. Each square is a day; the darker, the more time. Click a day to see that day’s sessions (Stats, Sessions). The number of weeks shown depends on how wide the card is: squares are kept big enough to click.
• Weekly goals: a bar for the whole room and one for each course that has a goal. A course’s name opens its page.
• Long-term goals: courses with a total goal, with percent done, hours to go and the pace needed.
• Recent sessions: your latest sessions, with the book and note if any.

6. The timer

Starting

Choose a course and an activity. If you keep a Library, a third box lets you pick the book or article you are reading (“Not reading anything in particular” otherwise); picking a book also selects its course, and a book with its file has Read it (Open the book while the timer runs). Press Start. Repeat last starts the same course, activity and book as your most recent session in one click.

While it runs

• Pause stops the clock without ending the session; press it again to resume. Paused time is not counted.
• You can type a note about the session while it runs.
• Started earlier? moves the start back by 5m, 10m, 15m, 30m, 45m or 1h when you forgot to press Start. It also works before you start: the same buttons then start the timer now, counting from that long ago.
• The timer keeps running if you close the tab, reload the page or quit and reopen your browser: it is kept in your browser, and its time is worked out from when it started. (If you clear your browser’s site data, a running timer is lost, so save first.)
• The bell icon switches break reminders on or off. With it on, your browser may ask permission to show notifications, and Voynich reminds you to take a break after every 30 minutes of active time (paused time does not count). The choice is kept in this browser.

Saving

Stop & save stores the session. A timer stopped within a minute (started and stopped by mistake) is not saved, and the timer says so: “Only 12 seconds, so it was not saved”; the reader’s and Writing’s timers do the same. Sessions under a minute saved before 0.48 are counted at the top of Sessions, with Delete them. While a timer runs, the browser tab’s title starts with its time (“12:04 Voynich”), so it can be seen from another tab. If saving fails (for example the disk is full), Voynich says why and the timer keeps running, so nothing is lost. Right after saving, a bar says “Saved” with the time and offers Add note (or Skip). If the session was about a book or article, it also asks Now on page so you can type the page you reached and press Save page.

7. Sessions

Every session is in Stats, Sessions, beside Charts and Week in review (until 0.55 this was a tab of its own, the Log, and its old links still lead here). The hall’s Stats has the hall’s own sessions there; each room’s are in that room’s Stats.

• Add a past session opens a form: choose the course, activity, optionally a book, the date, the time, the minutes and a note, then Add. The date and time start as now, or as the day you clicked in the calendar on Home.
• Sessions lists everything newest first, with how many and how long in all. Point at a row for its buttons: write a note about that session (shown all the time when it has notes, with how many), edit it (every field can be changed) and delete it. A deleted session leaves at once; Undo brings it back for a few seconds.
• A session’s book or document is a link to it, and each of its notes leads to the Notes tab and to its page in the book.
• Show only one course, one activity or one book with the boxes above the list (Show all clears them). Coming from a day in the calendar, the list shows only that day. A book’s sessions in the Library and a course in Stats open Sessions shown that way.

8. Stats

• Daily study time as bars, for 7d, 14d, 30d, 90d or 1y. Its colours show the courses, one colour each; switch to Activity beside the chart to colour by activity instead, with each course’s time side by side within a day, left to right in the order of your course list. The choice is kept. The side says hours. Hover or focus a bar for the exact time.
• This week vs last week: this week so far, last week up to the same day (with the difference in percent) and last week in total, with a chart by weekday.
• By course and by activity: where the time went, as bars with totals. A course opens its page, an activity its sessions.
• Week in review (the switch beside the ranges, Charts or Week in review): one week, Monday to Sunday, in one page. Its time against the week before and against your weekly goal (your room’s, or your courses’ added up), the days you studied (each day’s bar with its time under it, “45m”, “1.5h”) and your longest session, each course with its goal, the activities, the books you read and the documents you wrote in (with the time on each), the books you finished, the notes you wrote, and the flashcards you answered (with how many of the ones you knew you remembered) and made. The arrows go a week back or forward. It opens on this week, or on a Monday on the week just over. The hall’s Stats has the same, across all your rooms.

9. The hall

Think of Voynich as a library. The hall is its main hall, the first item in the room menu, where you study in general: books, writing and notes of any kind, that belong to no course. The rooms under it are study rooms, each for one thing you study. The hall has these pages along the top:

• Home, where you start. On the desk lists the books you are reading, one row each with a small cover, the page you are on and a line of how far you are; one click opens a book where you left off. Beside it are the documents you wrote in last, each saying where it is. Today lists the flashcards due in each room, every deadline of the next two weeks across your rooms (a course’s, or a document’s due day: each opens the course or the document’s page) and your reading plans (“6 pages a day to finish by 18 Nov”), or says it is a quiet day when there is none. Rooms has a door for each room, with its time today and this week, its cards due and its nearest deadline (and Timer on while its timer runs), and New room; a line under them links to your closed rooms. In the hall counts the hall’s own books, writing and notes.
• Library, the hall’s shelves: the books you keep in the hall, and every room’s books under In rooms (see The hall’s books).
• Writing: documents that belong to no room (free writing, an essay, a journal, a draft that has no course yet), in the same editor as a room’s (see Writing), citing any book on the hall’s shelves (the rooms’ too), and under them, In rooms, every room’s documents in the same kind of list, last changed first, each saying its room (with Room to show one room’s), so all your writing can be found in one place. Course chips show only when there are two courses or more to choose between.
• Notes: notes that belong to no room, with cards, the graph and links between them as in a room (a note in the hall and a note in a room do not link to each other). The hall has no flashcards: those are a room’s.
• Stats adds up the hall and all your rooms: today, this week, all time with the number of sessions, your streak (a day counts if the hall or any room has time on it), a daily chart, time per room (the hall among them), your top courses across rooms, and the most recent sessions. Week in review at the top shows a week across all your rooms (see Stats).
• Settings: the same page as in a room (see Settings).

Time in the hall. The hall is simpler than a room: there is nothing to set up and nothing to choose. Its time is what you time while you read one of its books (Start the timer in the reader) or write one of its documents (Start the timer in the document): it starts at once, as reading or as writing. That time counts in Stats and your streak like a room’s, as “The hall”, and a line under the hall’s title on Home says how much there was today and this week; The sessions there lists them, to put a mistake right. For a course, a goal or a timer of its own, a room is the place.

Moving between the hall and the rooms. A note or a document can go to the hall or into a room: the move button on a note card, or beside a document in Writing, lists where it can go and says what it leaves behind first. A note leaves its place’s subfields, the notes it is under (the notes under it stay, one level up), its session, its flashcards (they stay in their room, no longer from that note) and the comments on its lines in the graph; it keeps its book when the book is where it goes. A document leaves its subfield and folder and keeps its time spent, its versions and its citations. A book moves with Move into a room and Move it to the hall in the hall’s Library. The addresses of the old Overview and Archive pages lead to the hall.

10. Notes and the graph

Writing

• Press New note to open the editor (it starts folded once you have notes, so they come first). Anything half written is kept if you leave, until you save or discard it.
• Select text and use the toolbar: bold, italic, strikethrough, highlight, code, heading, quote, bullet list, checklist, link and picture. Ticking a checklist item on a saved note works right on the card.
• Pictures: paste a screenshot, or use the picture button. They are stored inside your data (see Backups).
• Start from: Reading note (claim, evidence, questions), Word study (word, meaning, example, forms, related), Lecture note, Learned, Question, Checklist and Terms fill in a starting shape. Save as a template keeps what you have written as one of your own, under a name you give, offered after the others (the × removes it); your templates are the same in every browser you use.
• Courses: tick one or several; the note then appears under each. About ties it to a book or article, with an optional page number (Now on p. 118 fills in the page the book is at). A thin line of each course's colour runs along the top of the card (a note in several courses shows every colour side by side) and curves with the card's corners in every theme.
• Under: put the note under one or more other notes (type part of a title and pick it; the × takes it out again). See Notes under notes.
• Pin keeps a note at the top. Ctrl+Enter saves (another key can be chosen in Shortcuts).
• You can also write a note right after a session (see The timer) or about a session in Stats, Sessions.

Linking

Type a note’s title between double brackets, like [[Sampling]], and it becomes a link. A link to a title that does not exist yet is shown as an “unwritten link”, ready to be written. Each card lists Linked from: the notes that point to it. Two notes can have the same title: the list that opens as you type [[ shows what tells them apart (the note each is under, its book, its subfields, the day it was made), and a link picked there, or made in the graph, remembers which one it means. While you edit it shows a short code after the title ([[Reasoning^05952bws]]); on the card it shows just the title. When a second note takes a title, the links that went to the first one keep going there.

Notes under notes

A note can sit under another note, for example Random sampling under Sampling. A note can be under several notes at once, and a note under a note can have notes under it too, as deep as you like. Put a note under another with Under in its editor, or with Put under... in the graph.

• A note is in the courses of every note above it as well as in its own. In the example, Random sampling is in Research methods because Sampling is, without being given that course itself. In the note’s editor that course shows as a dashed chip. You can still give it a course of its own as well (press the chip), but a new note under a note, or about a book that is under its course, is not given the course you were filtering by or the one a running timer is for: it has it already, and a second line to the same place would only add clutter.
• A note is also about the books of every note above it, the way it is in their courses. If Sampling is about a book, Random sampling shows that book too, as a dashed chip, and in the graph its bubble lists it under Also about. There is no line of its own to that book. A note can still be about a book of its own as well. Its editor shows the book too (the About box reads the book, through the note above), and the Page box is there as well: the page is then in that book, and it is shown beside the dashed chip.
• Each card shows Under with the notes it is under, and how many notes are under it; click one to go to it.
• A note cannot be put under itself, or under a note that is already under it. Voynich refuses that and says why.
• Deleting a note that has notes under it keeps them: they are given its courses and move up to the notes it was under. The question before deleting says so.
• A [[link]] and being under a note are separate: removing one leaves the other.
• The faint dashed lines the AI suggests (when it is on) never join notes of one family: two notes under the same note, or one above the other. The hierarchy already ties those together.

Books under courses, notes under books

The same idea reaches the Library: a book can sit under the course it is about, and the notes you write about a book sit under that book. So a course holds its books, and a book holds its notes.

• When you choose a course for a book in the Library, Voynich asks how the book is joined to it: Put it under the course (the first choice) or A normal connection, a plain line that says nothing more. Books you already had are under their course.
• A note you write about a book (About in the note’s editor) is put under that book at once, and you do not have to choose.
• As with notes under notes, a note is in the course of the book it is under, as well as its own courses. A book that is only connected to its course does not pass the course down to its notes.
• In the graph, a book under its course and a note under its book are joined by dashed lines, each in its own look (see Four kinds of line for being under something below). Put under... works for them too: a book goes under a course, a note goes under a book. Selecting the line of a book and its course shows Type: Under or Normal, to switch between the two.

Grid, full text and list

Layout, beside Cards and Graph, chooses how the cards show: Grid (small cards with the title, a few lines, the course dots, the book and the date; the usual choice), Full text (every note in full) and List (one row per note). Small, Medium and Large set the size in Grid (how many cards side by side and how many lines show) and in List (how roomy the rows are). In Grid and List, click a note to show it in full where it is, with its pictures and buttons; click its title again, press Esc or click another note to make it small again. A note opened from a link, a citation or the graph is shown in full. The same choice is in Settings, Notes, and it is kept in this browser for every room.

On a card

• The book chip opens the book in the reader at this note (its highlight lit up, or its page); a book without its file opens its Library card. A course’s name opens the course’s page.
• A note written about a highlight shows the highlighted words above it, leading to them in the book.
• Make a flashcard (the cards button) makes a flashcard from the note: its title on the front and its text on the back, both changeable first.
• Delete takes the note away at once, with Undo for a few seconds. After that it is in the Bin (the bin button next to the search) for 30 days: Put back brings it back with its courses, its place under other notes, the notes that were under it, its highlights, flashcards and pictures; Delete for good and Empty the bin delete it.

Finding

Filter by All, Pinned, a course, or No course, or type in Search notes. A course lists its notes and the notes under them. Notes can be dragged into your own order. The search and the filter are kept when you come back. A book’s notes in the Library opens the Notes tab showing only that book’s notes (the × on its chip shows them all again), with the book’s highlights that have no note folded above them, each with Open in the book and Make a flashcard.

Bringing notes from Obsidian or Notion

Import (beside the search on the Notes page) brings in notes written elsewhere. Choose a folder takes your Obsidian vault’s folder, or the folder of a Notion export (in Notion, export as Markdown & CSV and unzip it); Choose files takes some .md files. Voynich first says how many notes it found and how many are new; Bring in adds them.

• Each file becomes a note titled after the file (without the long number Notion adds to every name).
• Links between them stay links: Obsidian’s [[Note]] and [[Note|other words]], and Notion’s links to its own pages. A link to a heading inside a note goes to the note.
• Bold, italic, headings, lists and code come across. Obsidian’s settings at the top of a file (between --- lines) are left out, and so are embedded pictures and files (Voynich says how many).
• A note with a title you already have is left out, so bringing the same folder in again adds only what is new. The files themselves are only read, never changed.

Flashcards

Flashcards is a tab of its own in every room (until 0.55 it was a view of Notes; the hall’s Flashcards tab lists what is due in each room), and needs no AI. Its top says how many cards there are to study now (new, learning and to review), how many answers you gave today and how many days in a row you have studied, with Study now for every deck. The More button (···) beside it has Import from Anki, Import a text or CSV file, Export all to Anki, Export..., Check the cards, Study more and Settings. Under it are four tabs, Decks, Browse cards, Add cards and Stats; the one you used last opens next time.

Studying fills the window with the cards that are due, one at a time, and nothing else: the new, learning and review cards still to come along the top, and Quit reviewing (or Esc) to go back. Space or Enter shows the answer; you answer Again, Hard, Good or Easy (1 to 4, or Enter again for Good), and each button shows when the card would come back. Cards are scheduled with FSRS, the same method Anki uses: each card comes back when you would still remember it with the chance its deck’s preset asks for (90% to begin with; higher means more reviews). Every answer is kept with the card.

• While reviewing. Undo (Ctrl+Z) takes back the last answer, Bury or Suspend, and again, back through the session. E edits the card (or its note) in place. The card’s menu has Bury until tomorrow (-), Suspend (@, left out of reviews until taken back), Delete (with Undo) and Open in Browse; Ctrl+1 to 7 set one of seven flags. R plays the card’s sounds again, and Record yourself (Shift+V) lets you hear yourself after the card, to compare your accent. A card forgotten 8 times is a leech: it is tagged leech (and, if its preset says so, suspended), and the review says so.
• Cloze cards. Write a sentence and select words in it, then press Make a gap: they become {{c1::words}}, as in Anki. Each gap number is a card of its own ({{c1::...}} and {{c2::...}} make two cards; two gaps with the same number are asked together), and {{c1::onset::part}} shows [part] as a hint. On Show the answer the gap is filled in place and the hint goes. Once one card of a sentence or a note is answered, the others wait for the next day (bury siblings, in the preset).
• Typing the answer. With Type the answer on in a deck’s Options (or a note type whose card asks for it), a cloze card has a box in its gap and any other card a box under its front. Enter checks what you typed letter by letter (right letters in green, wrong ones in red, missing ones shown) and suggests an answer, which Enter takes. The deck’s language gives buttons for its letters that are hard to type (Alt+1 and on), and on a phone its keyboard. Whether case, accents and spaces at the ends count is the deck’s choice.
• Writing cards. Write it (Chinese) asks you to draw a character stroke by stroke on a pad: each stroke is checked as you draw, its outline shows after three misses, Show me plays the strokes in order, and the answer suggested depends on your misses. Write it (any script) is a free pad: draw, then compare with the answer and choose yourself. Add writing cards in a deck’s menu adds a writing card to each of its notes. The review stats list the characters you miss most.
• Decks. A card can be in a deck: a deck is made when a card is put in it, and Chinese::HSK 1 is a deck inside a deck. The Decks tab has a tile for each deck, with how many cards it has to review, how many new ones it can show today, and how many cards it has in all (decks inside opens them out). Study studies that deck alone, and Browse opens its cards. A deck’s menu (···) has Options, Study more, Add writing cards, Rename or move, Export to Anki and Delete the deck..., which asks whether its cards are kept in the deck above or deleted too (with Undo for a few seconds).
• Options and presets. A deck’s Options hold its language and typing, and the preset it goes by: a named set of scheduling options shared by the decks that choose it (a deck inside another goes by the deck above unless it chooses). A preset has new cards and reviews a day (a deck inside another is held by both), the learning and relearning steps (1m 10m), the longest gap, how much to remember, the order of new cards and of reviews, burying siblings, leeches, and sound (play a card’s sounds when shown, read it aloud in the deck’s language, readings over words only with the answer). Changing how much to remember or the longest gap says first how many cards would move, and can reschedule them. Settings holds the Default preset, and The next day starts at (4 am, as in Anki: reviewing past midnight still counts for the evening).
• FSRS in a preset. Spread reviews evenly over the days (load balancing, on) puts each review on the least busy of the few days FSRS leaves free around it, and Easy days gives the weekdays you choose fewer reviews, or none. Train on my answers fits FSRS to the answers of the preset’s cards once there are 400 given a day or more apart (until then it says how many more): it trains on your earlier answers and checks on your latest ones, which it did not see, and offers the new parameters only if they predicted those better by both measures it shows (log loss and RMSE, lower is better). Use them, then Save, keeps them, and each card’s memory is worked out again from its answers; Back to the defaults undoes it. Suggest a retention plays out a year at each retention from 70% to 95% with your own answer times and shows minutes a day and cards remembered, with the retention that costs the least time for each card remembered. That one is often the lowest offered, because forgetting more is cheap in time; choose by the table.
• Study more (the More menu, a deck’s menu, or when a deck is done for the day): more new cards or reviews today, Review forgotten cards, Review ahead, Preview new cards, Study by tag or state, and Cram for an exam (by default its answers change nothing, so a cram the day before an exam does not push everything far away). Saved, a study is listed under the decks as a study session to come back to.

Add cards makes a note: choose its note type and fill a box for each field, in the deck typed or chosen at the top (Ctrl+Enter adds it). Basic, Basic and reversed (a card each way), Basic, optional reversed, Cloze, Type the answer, Image occlusion and the two writing types are built in, and Note types makes your own, with the fields and cards you choose. A field can be bold, in italics, underlined, coloured, a list, and can hold pictures (paste, drag in or choose) and a recorded sound; \( \) and \[ \] draw maths, and 漢字[かんじ] a reading over a word. A sticky field keeps its text for the next note, a note whose first field is already here is pointed out, and Just added lists what you added, to fix a typo. Editing a note changes all its cards; each card keeps its own schedule. Image occlusion: choose a picture and draw boxes over the parts to hide, a card for each. A card can also be made from a note card, a highlight in the reader, or an AI answer, and says which note or book it came from.

• Browse cards lists the cards in a table. Its search box takes Anki’s search language: plain words search the cards’ text, and deck:German, tag:verbs, flag:1, is:due, is:new, is:suspended, prop:ivl>30, prop:r<0.8, rated:7:1, added:7, edited:3, a field by its name (German:*ung), re: for a regular expression, nc: for words without their accents and dupe: for notes that have a copy (the same first field; dupe:Basic of one note type), with - for not, or and brackets. A mistake is said under the box; How to search lists everything. The Sidebar has saved searches (Save this search), today, card states, flags, decks, note types and tags: a click searches, Ctrl adds it with and, Shift with or, Alt as not. Show a row for each card or each note, choose the Columns, and click a heading to sort by it (again for the other way). The chance of remembering (prop:r, the Retrievability column and its sorting, and the Stats) follows each deck’s preset: its trained FSRS parameters once you have saved them, FSRS’s own before.
• Chosen cards. Tick cards to choose them (Shift chooses every card between, and the box at the top every card shown, then Choose all that match). The bar at the bottom moves them to a deck, adds or removes tags, sets a flag, suspends or takes them back, Set due date, Reposition new cards, Forget, Change note type, Replace (find and replace in a field or all of them, words or a regular expression, with a preview first and Undo after), exports them and deletes them (with Undo). Find duplicates lists notes whose field says the same, with Choose the extra copies.
• One card. Click a card to open it beside the list: its note’s fields, its deck, tags and flag, Preview (both sides as a review shows them), where it is in learning it, each answer it was given, and its memory: how its chance of remembering it fell and rose over time. Esc closes it.
• Stats (the fourth tab): today’s answers, a year of review days with your streak, the forecast, reviews and their time by learning, young, mature and relearning, intervals, stability, difficulty and the chance of remembering each card, the hours you study, the answer buttons, cards added, a retention table, and which FSRS parameters each preset goes by. Choose 1 month, 3 months, a year or all, a deck, or the cards of any search. The smaller Review stats under the decks stay.
• Away from Voynich. If Voynich cannot be reached while you review (a phone out of the house), the review goes on: each card is scheduled on the device as it would be on the computer, and the answers wait there, in order, until Voynich can be reached; then they are sent by themselves.
• Import from Anki brings in an Anki deck (.apkg) or a whole collection (.colpkg): its decks, notes and note types, its pictures and sounds, tags, flags, suspended cards, how far you are with each card and the history of your answers. Brought in again, a card that is already here is updated where Anki answered it since (or, as Settings says, left as it is). Anki’s shared decks are on ankiweb.net/shared/decks: download one there, then bring it in this way.
• Import a text or CSV file brings in a word list saved from a spreadsheet as CSV, or a file Anki exported as text. Choose the file, then the separator (found by itself), the note type, the deck, tags for every note, and where each column goes (a field, the tags, the deck, or nowhere); the first rows are shown as they will come in, with how many notes that makes. A note whose first field is already here is left as it is, updated from the file, or added again, as you choose.
• Export... saves every deck or one as an Anki package, a CSV for a spreadsheet or Anki’s own text, with the schedule or without. An Anki package without the schedule has every card new, with no answers, flags or suspensions: a deck to share without your progress. Export all to Anki is the quick way, and the chosen cards in Browse cards can be exported too.
• Check the cards looks through the room’s cards and offers a fix for each problem it finds: cards not showing what their note makes now, cards a note lacks, cards their note no longer makes (empty cards, deleted only as you tick them, since their answers go with them), dates from a clock that was wrong, cards with no memory for FSRS, notes with no card, pictures and sounds no card uses, and files cards name that are missing.

The graph

Press Graph (next to Cards) to see your notes as dots joined by their links. Courses are the large ring-shaped dots, books are rectangles, notes are dots coloured by course (a note in two courses is split in two colours).

• The tick boxes Courses, Unwritten links and Books show or hide those kinds of dots; Fit fits everything in view. Your choices are remembered.
• Click a dot or a line and its details open in a bubble beside it. A line’s bubble names its kind (the names used in Customise) and its two ends, with an arrow from what is under to what it is under. The bubble follows the dot when you move or zoom the picture, opens on the dot’s other side near the edge of the picture, and has the buttons Open note (or Open in Library for a book), Connect to... and Clear. Clicking empty space closes it.
• The note panel. Open note in a note’s bubble (or a double-click on its dot) shows the note as its card in a panel at the right of the graph, below it on a narrow screen: its text, pictures (a picture of a page too), courses, book and links. A [[link]] on it shows the linked note in the panel. Edit under the card opens the whole editor in the same place: title, text, courses, under, book and page, pictures and pin, with Save and Delete note. Clicking another note’s dot shows that note in the panel. The close button or Esc closes it (in a field, the first Esc leaves the field). It is there in Full window and Fullscreen too. Go to card leaves the graph and shows the note’s card instead.
• New notes from the graph. New note beside Fit, the N key, or a double-click on empty space opens the panel with an empty editor. Add note in a dot’s bubble starts it already under that note, about that book, or in that course. Nothing is saved until you press Add note; the new note’s dot is then selected and brought to the middle.
• Full window (next to Fullscreen) makes the graph fill this browser window, without taking over the screen. It is for people who keep Voynich in a smaller window beside other things. The tick boxes and Fit come along, Esc leaves it, and Open note leaves it before showing the note. It works together with Fullscreen.
• Fullscreen (when your browser allows it) gives the graph the whole screen. Esc leaves it.
• Each course has a home of its own. The courses sit round a ring, each with room for its notes, and a note is drawn to its course’s home (a note in two courses between the two). Choosing one course above the graph, then All, moves nothing: the picture only shows and hides, so two courses never fall into each other. A note with no course sits in the middle of the ring. The first time the graph opens after 0.71 it lays everything out once in this way.
• Zoomed out, courses are named clouds. Below about three quarters of the full size, each course becomes a soft cloud in its colour with its name and number of notes, and the notes’ own names step aside until you zoom in again. A name that would cover a bigger course’s name is left out.
• Loose ends, under the graph, lists the notes joined to nothing (no link either way, not under a note, nothing under them, not about a book) and the books nothing is written about (no note about them and no document citing them). Each opens with a click. It is not shown when there are none.
• The picture stays as you left it. Voynich remembers where each dot is (the same in every browser you use), so the graph looks the same every time you open it, and a dot you move stays where it comes to rest. A new note appears next to what it is connected to. A dot is never left sitting on a line it is not part of: it is moved just off it. Pressing and holding a dot moves nothing; dragging it makes the others step aside, and everything comes to rest as soon as you stop moving. Names that would cover each other are not all written when the picture is zoomed out: the selected dot and what it touches, courses, books and the busiest notes come first, and the rest appear as you zoom in. Changing how hard the lines pull (Customise) lays everything out again.
• Four kinds of line for being under something. A dashed line runs from a book to the course it is under, from a note to the book it is about, and from a note to each note it is under. It pulls the lower dot close, so what is under something gathers around it, and it has a look of its own by how far down it is, so that you can tell the levels apart. A primary note is one about a book (or a note with nothing above it), a secondary note is under a primary note, and a tertiary note is under a secondary note, or anywhere further down. The four lines, from the top: subfield and book (dashed, in the course’s colour), book and primary note (heavy dashed, in the theme’s accent colour), primary and secondary note (dashed, the accent half faded) and secondary and tertiary note (thin dashed, grey). A dashed line is always the hierarchy: a [[link]] is a dotted line in the colour of a course the two notes share (or else the first note’s course; orange when neither has one), and a note in a course has a thin solid line in the course’s colour. In a light theme these automatic colours are darkened as much as needed to stay easy to see. None has an arrowhead until you switch it on in Customise. A note has a line to a course only for the courses you gave it yourself; it reaches the others through what is above it. If a [[link]] also joins two notes, they share that one line. A book that is only connected to its course has a plain thin line in the course’s colour instead. Arrowheads, pointing at the one above, can be switched on in Customise.
• Put under... (next to Connect to... when a note or a book is selected) puts it under the note, book or course you click next: a note goes under a note or a book, a book goes under a course. The shortcut: hold Alt and drag the note or book onto what it goes under (for a book and a course, Connect to... and Shift-drag make a normal connection). See Shortcuts for one for each kind of line. Select an under line and press Disconnect to take a note out from under another, or a book out of its course.
• Shortcuts. Hold keys while you drag from one dot onto another to choose the kind of connection: Shift makes a normal connection (two notes get a [[link]], a note joins a course, a note is about a book), Shift+1 puts a book under a course, Shift+2 a note under a book, Shift+3 or Shift+4 the dragged note under the other note (the message says whether it became a secondary or a tertiary note), Shift+5 adds a note to a course, and Alt puts it under whatever it is dropped on. For the book and course shortcuts either dot can be the one dragged. If the two dots do not fit the keys, nothing changes and a short line says what the keys join. In the graph, N starts a new note and F fits the picture. Every shortcut can be changed in Settings, Shortcuts (press Change, then the new keys; Esc cancels; a key that is already used is refused; Save a note is under Notes). They are named with the room’s own word for its parts (“Course and book”), as the Notes graph settings are. Kept in this browser.
• Change a connection’s type. Click the line between two notes and its bubble shows Type: Link (a [[link]] in the text) or Under (the first note under the second). Switching from a link takes the [[link]] out of the text (the words stay) and puts the note under the other; switching to a link takes it out from under and adds the [[link]] to its Related line. Swap turns an under line round, so the note that was above goes under. For a book and its course the choice is Under or Normal. A comment on the line moves with it, the line stays selected, and one Undo puts everything back. If the new connection cannot be made (for example it would put a note under itself), nothing changes.
• A connection can carry a short comment that keeps its history, so you can write why two notes belong together. The comment is written along the line, tilted with it and cut with “...” to fit between the two dots; select the line to read it in full. A changed or removed comment can be brought back with Restore.
• In Settings, Notes, Notes graph, you can choose the shape of each kind of dot and how the graph moves (it follows your computer’s “reduce motion” setting by default).
• Customise, in the same place, starts closed and is optional. For every kind of line, listed from the most important (it pulls hardest) to the least: subfield and book, book and primary, primary and secondary, secondary and tertiary, links, note and subfield, and suggestions, you can set its style (solid, dashed or dotted), width, colour, opacity and strength (how hard it pulls its two dots together), and for the four lines for being under something whether they have an arrowhead (off to begin with); for every kind of dot its fill colour and opacity and its border colour and width; and the general pull: Spread (how hard dots push apart) and Centre (how hard everything is pulled to the middle). Background sets the picture’s background: automatically it is pitch black in a dark theme (so the dots and lines stand out from it) and the theme’s own in a light one. Automatic keeps the colour the graph picks itself, such as a course’s colour. A line still lights up when its dot is selected and fades when another is. Back to the defaults brings back the usual look. The choices are kept in this browser and used in every room.

Around this note

An open note card (click a card in Grid or List, or any card in Full text) shows Around this note under its text: a small picture of the notes it is joined to (its links, the notes that link to it, the notes it is under and those under it) round it, and theirs further out. It is the same picture every time. Click a dot to open that note. A note joined to many shows the ten nearest and says how many more there are.

The canvas

Press Canvas (beside Cards and Graph) for boards of your own: a canvas is a page where you put notes, books and your own words by hand, wherever you like, and draw lines between them with words on the lines (a concept map: the plan of an essay, the parts of a theory). Unlike the graph, nothing on it moves by itself.

• New canvas makes one and asks its name; the list beside it switches between a room’s canvases, and the last one you looked at opens next time. Rename and Delete are beside it. Deleting a canvas removes only the board and its lines, never the notes or books on it.
• Add a note or a book: type part of its title and pick it. Add words puts words of your own on the board. Each lands in the middle of what you see.
• Drag a thing to move it, drag the empty board to move around, and use the mouse wheel or the + and − buttons to zoom.
• Click a thing to select it, then Join to… and click another to draw a line between them (Esc stops). Click a line to select it: Write on the line puts words on it, Remove the line takes it away. Words of your own can be changed with Edit words.
• Take off (or Delete) takes the selected thing off the canvas with its lines. A double-click on a note or a book opens it. A note or book deleted from the room stays on the board, greyed, as gone.
• Canvases are kept with the rest of the room: in the backups, in Download everything, and they go when the room is deleted. Flashcards cannot be put on a canvas yet.

11. The Library: books

Each room’s Library tab has its books and articles, described here; what you write yourself is in Writing, the tab beside it. The hall’s Library has every book of every room, and books you keep in the hall (see The hall’s books below).

Adding a text

Press Add. In the box, type:

• an ISBN: finds that one book (Open Library first, then Google Books for missing details);
• a DOI: finds that article or chapter on Crossref;
• words: searches Open Library for books and Crossref for articles and chapters, and also ISBNdb and Google Books if you saved their keys (see below).

Pick a result, check and correct the details (title, authors, year, publisher, pages, edition...) and save. If you choose a course for the book, Voynich asks whether to put the book under that course or to make it a normal connection (see Books under courses, notes under books). Enter it by hand instead skips the search entirely, and Choose a PDF or EPUB file adds books from files, each with its file (the same as dropping them, below). When a book comes from a search, Voynich also keeps its cover picture.

Dropping files. Drag PDF or EPUB files onto the Library and each becomes a book with its file attached. Voynich reads from the file what it can: the title and authors, the number of pages, and a cover (the first page of a PDF, the cover picture of an EPUB). If the file names its ISBN, Voynich also looks the book up (as Search does) to fill in the publisher, year, edition and the shop cover; Look up dropped books in Settings, Reading, Book search, turns that off.

The shelf and the list

One row of tools sits above the books: Shelf or List, Filter, Arrange and More. Each room (and the hall) remembers your choices in each browser.

• Shelf: each book’s cover, with its title, authors, year and course under it and a thin line for how far you are. A book with a file has Read on its cover; its ... menu (on the cover when the pointer is over it, always on a phone) changes the status, opens Edit details, moves it (into a room, or to the hall) and deletes it. +1 inside means a chapter or an article is under it. Click the cover or the title to open the book’s own page.
• List: a row for each book, with its course, author, year, status, progress and when you last read it. Click a column’s heading to sort by it. Chapters and articles are indented under the book they are in.
• Continue reading, at the top when you look at all your books grouped by anything but status (grouped by status, the Reading group is already first): the books you are reading, last read first; one click opens the reader where you left it.
• Filter shows only one course, one kind of text, those with a file to read or those with notes; the button says how many filters are on, and Show everything clears them. Arrange groups them by status, course, shelf, author, year or nothing (the hall’s Library also by room) and sorts them by last read, last added, title (a leading The or A aside), author, year or progress.
• Covers: a book without a picture has a made cover, its title and author on its colour. Find missing covers in More takes each cover from the book’s own file (a PDF’s first page, an EPUB’s cover picture) or, for a book with an ISBN, from Open Library. Hide cover pictures is there too, and so are New shelf (before there is one) and Import and export.

A book’s own page

Click a book on the shelf or in the list to open its own page, where everything about it is together:

• At the top: the cover and details, the status (change it there), the course, the book it is part of, how far you are with the pace and time left, Now on page and Finish by (a reading plan: the pages a day it takes), then Read (or Continue reading), Notes and Edit details.
• Tiles: the notes and highlights about it, its flashcards (how many are due), the time read and the documents that cite it; each tile takes you to its part of the page (Flashcards to the Flashcards tab), and that part leads on (Open in Notes, All its sessions).
• Notes about it with their pages, its highlights that have no note, the chapters and articles inside it, and the latest reading logged against it.
• Where it is kept: the shelves it is on (its room’s, and the hall’s), each with × to take it off and Add... for another; whether it is under its course (its notes count in the course too) or only connected to it; and the book it is part of. File: attach, replace or remove its PDF or EPUB. Citation: the reference in the style you choose, with Copy.

Links to a book from elsewhere (a note’s book, a flashcard, the graph, search, the reader’s way back) open this page.

Shelves, smart shelves and books under books

• Shelves. The panel beside the books holds your own shelves (it shows once there is one: make the first with More, New shelf; on a phone or a narrow window it folds behind a Shelves button above the books), for books and documents alike (they were called folders before 0.41): New shelf, and on a shelf New shelf inside, rename and delete. Two shelves side by side cannot have the same name (“There is already a shelf of that name here”); in different places they can. A book or a document can be on several shelves. Click a shelf to show what is on it (and on the shelves inside it); its number counts each once. A shelf with shelves inside has an arrow to close it and open it again, and a closed shelf stays closed in that browser. All books and Not on a shelf are at the top. Put a book on a shelf by dragging it onto the shelf (it stays on its other shelves too), or with Add... on its page. Deleting a shelf keeps what was on it: it goes onto the shelf above (or onto none). Your folders from before 0.41 became shelves, with everything that was in them.
• Smart shelves hold what their rules pick, and nothing is put on them by hand: New smart shelf starts from a ready-made one (Has a PDF or EPUB, Not opened in 30 days, Finished this year, With notes; for documents Due this month, Over 5,000 words, Edited this week) or your own: words in the title or authors, the status, a file, notes, days since it was opened. Its pencil changes the rules.
• Choosing several books. More, Choose several books, puts a tick on each cover (or row). Pick books, or Choose all, and the bar at the bottom puts them on a shelf, takes them off the shelf you are looking at, sets their status or course, moves them to the hall or another room, copies their references (APA) to paste in a document, or deletes them.
• Books under books. Part of on a book’s page puts it under another book, for a chapter, a volume of a series or an article in a collection. On the shelf its book says +1 inside; in the list it is folded under that book until you open it, at any depth. A book cannot go under itself or a book under it.

The hall’s books

The hall’s Library keeps books that belong to no room: anything you read in general. Drop PDF or EPUB files on it, or Add a book by its ISBN or title, as in a Library. They are read in the same reader, with highlights, text boxes, drawings, notes (the hall’s), Ask and the timer; flashcards belong to a room. It also lists every room’s books, grouped by room at first (the hall’s own first), and the rooms are a filter in the panel beside them; every book can be edited here (its room’s courses to choose from, for a room’s book). The hall’s shelves are its own, and hold any book: a book in a room can be on a shelf here beside the hall’s own books, and keeps its shelves in its room’s Library (a book can be on Syntax in its room and on Linguistics here). Drag a book onto a shelf, or Add... under Shelves in the hall on its page; a shelf shows its books together, whatever room each is in. A book can go under another book of the same room, or of none. Move into a room, in the ... menu of a book of the hall, moves it there, with its file and highlights, when it belongs to a course there. Move it to the hall does the opposite for a book that has no notes, sessions, flashcards or citations yet.

Reading a text

• Status: To read, Reading, Paused, Read. Starting to read and finishing are dated for you.
• Finish by: a day to finish the book by (a book being read, paused or on the to-read pile). With its number of pages, Voynich says how many pages a day that takes from the page you are on, counting today and that day (“12 pages a day to finish by 30 Nov”), here and on the room’s Home; once the day has passed it says how many pages are left. Without the number of pages it says to add them (Edit details) to see the pages a day. Empty the box to drop the plan.
• Now on page: type the page you are on. Voynich shows the percent done, pages per hour from your timed sessions, and the time left (“about 4 h left”). Settings, Books (in any room) can also add a guess of how many weeks that is at your recent pace; it is off by default because it is only a rough guess, and the hours are useful on their own.
• Pick the text in the timer and the session counts towards it (“4h in 3 sessions, last today”).
• Notes about a text show how many there are, and can name the page they are about. 3 notes opens the Notes tab showing only them, and the time read (4h in 3 sessions) opens its sessions in Stats. Cited in lists the documents that cite the book, and the course chip opens the course’s page.
• Filter by course, search with Search the library, and use Covers to show or hide the pictures.
• A PDF or EPUB of the book: edit the book and choose Attach a PDF or EPUB (up to 500 MB). Voynich keeps its own copy in a books folder next to your data and never changes your file. The book then has a Read button (see Reading). Replace and Remove are in the same place; removing the file keeps the book, its notes and its highlights. Deleting the book deletes Voynich’s copy of the file. A book whose file is not on this computer (after moving to a new one, for example) says so; attach the file again and it is back, with its highlights.

Citations and sharing

Import and export (below the list) copies your citations as BibTeX or RIS for a reference manager or paper, and reads those formats back in.

From Zotero on this computer (in the same place) brings in a whole Zotero library. Leave the box empty for Zotero’s usual folder (Zotero in your home folder), or type the folder Zotero keeps its data in (Zotero shows it under Settings, Advanced, Files and Folders). Look at it says how many items are new, in how many collections, with how many highlights and notes; Bring in adds them:

• each item as a book, with its authors, year, publisher, DOI, ISBN and the rest;
• each collection as a shelf (collections inside collections as shelves inside shelves), with its items on it;
• the highlights and comments made in Zotero’s reader, as notes about that book at their page, and the notes on an item as notes about it;
• if you tick it, each item’s PDF or EPUB, copied (Voynich says how much that is first).

Zotero can stay open: Voynich reads a copy of its database and never changes anything of Zotero’s. Items you already have (the same ISBN, DOI, or title, year and first author) are left as they are, so it can be run again later for what is new. Items in Zotero’s bin are left out.

Better search with keys (optional)

Open Library and Crossref are free but do not know every edition. In Settings, Reading, Book search, you can add an ISBNdb key (a paid service with a short free trial, with a large catalogue in many languages) and/or a Google Books key (free, with limits; you create it in Google Cloud Console). A key is checked when you save it, kept only on your computer, never shown again, and sent only to its own service.

12. Reading

A book with a PDF or EPUB attached (see The Library) opens in Voynich with Read. The book, its notes and its highlights stay on your computer, and the reader asks nothing of any other site: everything it shows comes from Voynich itself.

Reading a PDF

• The bar along the top has the way back (Library, or The hall for a book of the hall), Contents (when the PDF has a contents list), Go to notes and the title on the left; the page in the middle (the page box shows the page you are on, of how many: type another and press Enter, or use the arrows), the zoom with its size in percent, and search; and on the right the tools: Text, Pen, the timer, More (…) with Save with notes, Read another book beside, Share pages, Dim the pages, Text boxes beside the page and Page numbers do not match?, and the button that shows or hides the side panel (notes and Ask). Page Down and Page Up go a page on or back.
• Search in the book (or press /) finds words on every page and marks them; Enter goes to the next one. A word broken over two lines is found too.
• The minus and plus buttons zoom; the size between them fits the width of the window again (the width most pages have, so a cover or a foldout of another size does not decide it). Dim the pages (under More) makes white pages softer on a dark theme.
• Page numbers. The reader shows the page number printed in the book (“p. 45”), not the count of PDF pages, so your notes and citations match the paper book. Most PDFs say their own numbers. If one does not, go to the page printed as 1 and choose Page numbers do not match? under More to set them. The book’s Now on page in the Library follows the page you read, forward only: going back to the contents or an earlier chapter does not undo your progress (change it by hand in the Library if you need to).
• Close the book and open it again: it opens where you were. A file you open for the first time opens at the page the book is at (the progress you kept by hand, for example on paper).
• A scanned book (pictures of pages) has no text of its own, so the reader offers to read it (see Scanned books below). A PDF locked with a password asks for it; Voynich does not keep the password.

Scanned books: reading their text (OCR)

A PDF made of pictures of pages has no text, so at first its words cannot be selected, highlighted, searched or asked about. The bar above such a book offers to read the text from the pictures (OCR), on your computer.

• Choose the languages the book is in (up to three; English to start with, and... adds another, the × takes one out), then press Read the text. Choosing the right languages matters: letters like ö, ğ and ı are read well only when Turkish is among them.
• The first time a language is used, Voynich downloads its reading data (1 to 6 MB) once and keeps it; the bar says which and how much before you press. The pages themselves are read on this computer and never leave it (see Privacy).
• It starts at the page you are on and takes a few seconds a page; the bar shows how far it has come and about how long is left. You can go on reading meanwhile: each page you see gets its text as soon as it is read. Stop, or closing the book, stops it; next time the bar says how many pages are read, with Go on reading the text and Forget it.
• When every page is read, the bar goes, and the book works as a PDF with text: select words to highlight, quote, Look up or ask about them, search in the book, find it with Search everything, quote it from Writing, and ask about the whole book. Your highlights stay where they are.
• What OCR reads is kept with the book, in your data, and goes when the book’s file is removed or replaced. How good it is depends on the scan: a clean scan of print reads almost without mistakes; handwriting, very small print, unusual typefaces or a crooked page less well. Check a quotation against the page before you rely on it.
• It reads only pages that have no text of their own, so a PDF where only some pages are scans is offered it only if Voynich found no text when it first opened the book.

Looking up a word

Select a word or a short phrase (up to six words) and press Look up. A card shows it with the sentence it is in, and, with the AI tab on, what it means in that sentence: its dictionary form (a noun with its article and plural, a verb in its infinitive), how it is read for a script that is not the Latin alphabet (pinyin with tones for Chinese, kana for Japanese; never a made-up pronunciation for a Latin-alphabet word), its kind of word, and, for a sentence in another language, the sentence in English. Make a card opens Make a flashcard with the word on the front and the meaning and the sentence on the back, to change before saving. Only the word, its sentence and the book’s title go to the AI you chose, and only when you press Look up; without the AI the card still has the sentence. What an AI says about a word can be wrong: check what matters.

Reading an EPUB

An EPUB opens in the same reader, one chapter at a time, with the same bar (the chapter and how far in, with arrows for the chapter before and after, in the middle), notes, highlights and questions. Text size and page colour (the Aa button) sets the size of the letters, the space between lines, the margins, and the page colour (your theme’s, or sepia). A link to another chapter goes there; a link to a web page asks before it opens. The book’s own scripts never run. A book locked by the shop that sold it (DRM) cannot be opened here, and the reader says so.

Text (the T in the bar) writes a text box beside a paragraph: press it and click the paragraph, on the side of the text where the box should go, then type (leaving the box or Ctrl+Enter keeps it, Esc drops it). As an EPUB’s text moves with the text size and the window, the box belongs to its paragraph and is shown in the margin next to it wherever that paragraph is. Where the margin has no room (a phone), a small mark stands by the paragraph and a tap shows the box. Its menu has its colour, its text size, Edit (or double-click it), Make it a note (its title then shows at its top), Move to the other side and Delete text box. The pen is for PDFs only: drawings cannot stay on the words they marked once an EPUB’s text moves.

Notes and highlights

• The Notes panel beside the book is for writing while you read. What you type there becomes an ordinary note about this book and the page you are on, saved as you type. New note (or N) starts another, and the × in the box clears it. A quote goes into the note being written; when the box holds a note you opened to change, a quote starts a new note instead.
• Select words on the page: Quote puts them in your note with their page, Highlight marks them in one of three colours (yellow, green, blue), Copy cited copies them in quotation marks with their citation, to paste anywhere (“the words” (Odden 2005: 212)), in the citation style of the room’s last document in Writing, or APA when there is none (in an EPUB, whose chapters are not pages, the citation has no page), Read aloud reads them with the computer’s own voice, and Ask asks the AI about them (below). Highlighting does not open the Notes panel; Write a note in the highlight’s menu does. The + after the colours adds a colour of your own (up to eight, the same in every browser you use); it is used like the others, in Save with notes too. A highlight made in pink, orange, purple, red or teal (offered before 0.53) keeps its colour, which shows beside the three in its menu. Lines that are close together are highlighted one by one, without marking the space between them twice.
• Click a highlight to change its colour, open or write its note, Make a flashcard of it (the highlighted words are the answer), or remove it; removing it keeps its note. Highlights stay on their words at any zoom or text size, and are kept in Voynich, never written into your file.
• In a PDF, Text writes on the page itself, in a margin or any empty space: press it, click where the text goes and type (leaving the box or Ctrl+Enter keeps it, Esc drops it). Drag a text box to move it, drag its right edge to make it wider, and double-click it to change the text: the caret goes where you double-clicked and the page stays where it is, however long the box. A box that runs past the bottom of its page stays on top of the next page there. Opening another box while you write keeps what you wrote in the first. A text box can also go beside the page, in the dark space to its left or right: click there with Text on, or drag a box there. If you would rather not, turn off Text boxes beside the page under More: new and moved boxes then stay on the page, and ones already beside it stay where they are (kept in this browser). New text boxes start at 8 pt. While you write, the small bar over the box has Raise and Lower (Ctrl+Up, Ctrl+Down): they turn the letter before the cursor (or the selected letters) into a raised or lowered one, as in kʲ or x₂, for the letters and numbers that have one (with the IPA’s). Click a box for its colour, its text size, Make it a note (it asks for the note’s title and where it goes, on its own or under a note you find by typing; then it becomes an ordinary note about the book at that page, and the box shows the note: its title on the first line, then its text, with numbered and bulleted lines kept; the Notes panel stays as it was) and Delete text box, which can be undone for a few seconds and keeps the note. A click anywhere else closes its menu. Lock text boxes under More keeps every box where it is: dragging one does nothing, a finger on a box scrolls the page (useful on a phone), and a click or tap still opens its menu. It is remembered in each browser, so the boxes can be locked on the phone and movable on the computer.
• In a PDF, Pen writes or draws on the page by hand (with the mouse, a pen or a finger): choose the ink (black, blue, red or green) and the thickness, and Undo the last line takes lines back one by one. Done (or Esc) puts the pen down. Click a line later to change its ink or thickness or to delete it.
• What the colours mean: above the list in the Notes panel the colours of the book’s highlights are shown; Meanings lets you say what each colour means to you (yellow: a definition, green: an example). The meaning is then shown beside it and on the colour buttons, the same in every book and browser. Click a colour there to list only its highlights; click it again for all.
• Read aloud: the computer’s own voices read to you, and nothing is sent anywhere. Select words and press Read aloud, or, for a whole page of a PDF, Read this page aloud under More (in an EPUB, the speaker button reads the chapter). Stop reading aloud, at the foot of the window, stops it. Which voices there are depends on the computer; more can be added in its language or speech settings.
• All in one note (above the list in the Notes panel) makes one new note about the book of every highlight and text box in it, in the order of the book (page by page and down each page; in an EPUB, chapter by chapter): highlights as quotations with their page, text boxes as their words. Drawings are left out. A note holds 20,000 characters; when they do not all fit, it has the first ones and says how many.
• On a phone, a tap on the page hides the bar at the top, so the book has the whole screen, and another tap brings it back; the page stays where it is under your finger. A swipe scrolls as before, and a tap on a link, a highlight or a text box does what it always does. The first time, a short line says how to bring the bar back.
• Go to notes (next to Contents; under More on a phone) opens the Notes tab; the Library tab brings you back to the book, at the page where you were.
• Read another book beside (under More; in an EPUB, the button with two books next to Aa) opens a second PDF or EPUB of the same room beside the one you read, to read two texts on one topic side by side. Each keeps its own page. In the second book, select words to Highlight them there (in any colour) or Quote in my note: the quotation goes into the note you are writing, followed by the other book’s title and page, and the note stays about the first book. The buttons on its bar put it on the other side, choose another book or close it. Which book is beside, and on which side, is remembered for each book. An EPUB beside is read chapter by chapter. On a phone-sized screen there is no room for two, so the second book is not shown there.
• Open in its own window (the arrow out of a box, on the bar of the book beside) moves that book into a window of its own, its reader at the page it was on, to put on another screen. The book beside closes in the first window. Writing has the same button (see Writing). If nothing opens, your browser blocked the new window: allow pop-ups for Voynich.
• Save with notes (a PDF) saves a copy of the book with your highlights (and the notes written about them, as their comments), text boxes and drawings written into the file as ordinary PDF annotations, so whoever you share it with sees them in Adobe Acrobat, Edge, Chrome, Brave, Firefox or Preview. Voynich's own copy of the book is not changed, so your highlights stay yours to change. A page with a text box beside it is made wider in the copy, with white paper on both sides, so that the box is on the page. The text of a text box is written with the Noto Sans font, which has Turkish, the IPA, Greek and Cyrillic; Chinese, Japanese or Korean in a text box shows as empty boxes on the page, though the full text is in the annotation's comment. A PDF locked with a password cannot be written into.
• Share pages (under More) saves or shares part of a PDF: This page, or Pages from one to another, as a PDF, or the one page as a PNG picture, with or without your highlights, notes, text boxes and drawings. Share... opens your computer’s own way to share when it has one.
• The Notes panel lists the book’s notes by page and, to begin with, Follows the page: the last page first, kept scrolled to the notes of the page you are reading (it waits while the pointer is on the list). The button above the list switches to First page first or Last page first, which stay put (Voynich remembers which). Quotations are shown as quotations. Click one to go to its page, with its passage lit up. Notes under a note about the book that have no book of their own are listed too. They are ordinary notes: they are also in the Notes tab and the graph, as notes about the book. Delete note (point at a note) deletes it; Undo brings it back for a few seconds. Search the notes above the list keeps only the notes and highlights with every word you type (in any case, with or without accents); Esc empties it.
• Whole note (under the note being written) opens the whole note: its subfields, pictures, and Under, the notes it is put under, which is its place in the graph. A note written in the reader goes on its own, linked to the book, unless you choose otherwise with the button left of New note: it shows where new notes go (On its own, or Under a note), and a click lets you find a note to put them under. The choice is remembered for the book, and a new note you are writing moves there too.

Asking about what you read

The Ask tab (with the AI tab turned on, see The AI tab) answers questions about the words you selected or the page you are on, with quick ones such as Explain this or Translate to English. It says which AI answers and where it runs. Only your question and that passage are sent, and only when you ask. The first time you open Ask on a book, it is prepared for questions by itself (from 0.72; before, it waited for a button), reading the whole book into the search index once, in this browser, with a line saying how far it is and a way to stop it (Prepare goes on from there later); then you can ask the whole book and your notes, and the answer’s citations open the reader at the right page. Conversations are saved with the book and are also in the AI tab.

The timer

Opening a book does not start the timer. Start the timer in the reader starts it for this book (choose the course and activity); Started earlier? starts it counting from 5 minutes to an hour ago. While it runs, the time shows on the bar: click it to move the start back. Stop saves an ordinary session, as on Home, and asks for a note for the session (optional), already filled in with the pages you read (“pp. 12-30”; for an EPUB, the chapters). The notes you wrote in the reader while it ran belong to that session.

13. Writing

Writing, the tab beside Library, has what you write yourself: essays, articles, chapters, a talk. A document is saved as you type, in your own data on your computer, and nothing in it is sent anywhere. Writing and Library each remember where you were: go to Notes or the graph and come back, and the document you were writing (with its panel or its book's PDF open at the same page), or the book you were reading, is there again.

Your documents

• New document starts one. The arrow beside it starts one from a template: Term paper (introduction, background, discussion, conclusion), Thesis chapter (numbered sections and a table of contents), Journal article (abstract, introduction, data and method, analysis, discussion, conclusion) or Conference abstract (a word limit of 500). The parts are headings to write under; everything can be changed as in any document. The list shows the newest first, with the number of words and when it was last changed. Search with Search your documents and filter by course.
• Import opens a Word file (.docx) or a plain text file as a new document, to go on writing it here: headings, lists, tables, quotations, bold and the rest, links, pictures and footnotes come with it, and so does the look of the paper: its font, text size, line spacing and margins and where its page numbers are (set under Page), each paragraph’s lining up (centred, justified), first-line and hanging indents, paragraphs moved in from the left (as quotations, in their own text size: a 10 pt quotation stays 10 pt), a paragraph’s own line spacing (a single-spaced quotation in a 1.5-spaced paper stays single-spaced), the looks of the headings and of the title (a Heading 1 the size of the text, bold and centred, stays so; Page, Title and headings shows them, and changes them), empty lines, page breaks and section breaks (a title page stays on its own page, in the middle of it if it was so in Word, and each chapter that started a new page still does), the page numbers of each section (front pages numbered i, ii, the text from 1 again, none on a chapter’s first page), footnotes with their italics and bold, and Word’s table of contents, which becomes Voynich’s under its own title. The document is named after the file’s Title (or first heading), which stays in the text as it was; otherwise after the file’s name. The font is the one most of the text is in (a Word file often sets Times New Roman on its words over a Calibri or Aptos style); one Voynich does not have becomes the nearest of its kind (Arial for a sans font, Times New Roman otherwise), never the font of the document you wrote before. Your file is not changed or kept. What Word has and Voynich does not (fonts of single words other than the text’s, the colours of headings, comments, tracked changes, drawings) is left out, and Voynich says when something was. An old .doc file must be saved as .docx in Word first.
• Give a document a course under Page, so it shows under that course.
• Shelves: the same shelves as the Library’s, and smart shelves for documents (see Shelves). Drag a document onto a shelf, or put it on one on its page. The list shows each document’s words, when it last changed, its course, its due day and its shelves; the pencil beside its title opens it in the editor.
• A document’s own page (click its title): how many words it has and a line of how they grew (from its kept versions), its due day, the books it cites (each opening its own page), the time written on it and its sessions, its shelves and its versions, with Open in the editor, the move button and Put in the bin.
• Start the timer in a document times its writing: it starts with the document’s course and a writing activity, has Started earlier?, and the time spent shows next to it (“3h 20m writing”). The sessions are in Stats, Sessions, with a link back to the document.
• More, Move to the bin in a document moves it to the Bin (it asks first). In the Bin, Take out brings it back and Delete for good deletes it and its earlier versions, after asking.

Writing

• Above the document is one row: All documents, the timer, the word count, and Page, Paper, Side panel (Outline, Comments, Notes, Book, Versions, one at a time beside the document), Download, Share live and More (Focus and Move to the bin); in a window narrower than a full laptop screen the buttons show only their pictures (each says its name when you point at it), so they stay on the one row. It stays on screen with the toolbar while the document scrolls; on a phone only the toolbar does, as one row that scrolls sideways, and its menus open at the foot of the screen.
• The toolbar has what is used all the time: undo and redo, the text style (Text; Title and Subtitle, large words for the head of a paper, a chapter or a title page that are not headings, so they are not numbered and not in the outline or the table of contents, and Enter after one goes on in ordinary text; or Heading 1 to 6), bold, italic, underline, bulleted and numbered lists, quotation, link, Cite, Footnote and Comment, then Find and Suggest. Insert has a picture, a table (with buttons to add and remove rows and columns while you are in it), a page break, a table of contents, table and figure captions and their lists, and Cross-ref; and, when the document has Tools for linguistics on, Example, Tree and IPA. Format has the font and text size of the selected words (the first choice is the document’s own), strikethrough, superscript and subscript, and lining up (left, centre, right, or justified with both edges straight).
• Select words and a small bar comes up over them: bold, italic, underline, a link, a comment and Cite.
• Type / at the start of a line (or after a space) for a menu of what can go in: a heading, a list, a quotation, a citation, a footnote, a table, a picture, a page break, a table of contents, a caption, a cross-reference, an example or a tree. Type a few letters to narrow it (/he for the headings), the arrows to choose, Enter to put it in; Esc or a space leaves the / as it is.
• Focus (under More, or Ctrl+Shift+F) leaves only the document: the top bar and the notes above the page are hidden until you press Esc or Leave focus.
• Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on a Mac) puts a page break where the cursor is: what follows starts a new page in the paper view, the PDF and every download. A page break that falls at the very foot of a full page stays on that page, as in Word, so it never leaves a blank page. It shows as a dashed line; select it and delete it like any block. The words on the line are also a choice of what the page numbers do from there: numbers start again at 1 (the pages before it are then numbered i, ii, iii, as the title page and the contents of a thesis usually are, or 1, 2, 3 if you choose so under Page; a Word file brings its own choice), numbers start again, none on this page, or no number on this page (a chapter’s first page). The table of contents counts a page without a number all the same. Word, OpenDocument and LaTeX files follow it.
• Tab moves a paragraph’s first line in (1.27 cm, as in Word), and the paragraphs you start after it with Enter are moved in too; Shift+Tab, or Backspace at the start of the paragraph, takes it out. In a list, Tab moves the item one level deeper; in a table, to the next cell. The PDF, Word and OpenDocument files keep it. Since Tab stays in the text, Esc leaves it for the toolbar.
• IPA (under Insert) opens the IPA symbols: consonants, vowels, length, stress and tone, and the diacritics (click a diacritic after the letter it goes on).
• Page sets the whole document out: its citation style and course, its font, text size, line spacing (single, 1.15, 1.5, double, or any number), the space after paragraphs, the page margins in centimetres, Page numbers (top or bottom, left, centre or right, and if you like none on the first page; and, when a page break starts the numbers again at 1, whether the pages before it are numbered i, ii, iii or 1, 2, 3), Title and headings (below), A title page in the middle (what comes before the first page break sits halfway down the first page), Number the headings (Heading 1 is 1., 2., a Heading 2 under it 1.1, 1.2, a Heading 3 1.1.1, down to Heading 6; each chapter’s sections count from 1 again, and a Heading 3 straight under a Heading 1 is 3.0.1, as in Word), Tools for linguistics (examples, trees and IPA in Insert and the / menu; off for a plain essay, which changes nothing in the text) and a Word limit: with one, the word count under the text reads “412 / 500 words”, turns amber near the limit and red past it (hover over it for how many are left or over). The PDF, Word and OpenDocument files follow them. A new document starts with the settings of the last one you wrote; an imported Word file has its own (its page numbers, whether its headings are numbered, its title page), never the last document’s. A font that is not on this computer says so; Word or LibreOffice on another computer use their own in its place.
• The document’s name is the line above the pages (or above the text without them): it names the document in Writing’s list and the files you download, and it is never printed on the pages, the PDF or the downloads. A paper’s title is a Title paragraph in the text (Turn into, Title).
• Title and headings (under Page) sets how the Title and each heading level look: the size, bold, italics, centred, and indented as a paragraph’s first line. One press gives a style’s own looks, as their guides set them: APA 7 (all at the text’s size; the title and level 1 centred and bold, level 2 bold, level 3 bold italic, levels 4 and 5 indented: APA runs them into their paragraph, here they stand on their own line), Chicago (Turabian’s plan, all at the text’s size: level 1 centred bold, 2 centred plain, 3 bold, 4 plain, 5 italic), MLA 9 (all at the text’s size, no bold, the title centred; MLA sets no heading levels, so level 1 is plain and the rest italic), or Voynich’s (larger headings). Harvard and the Unified Style Sheet set no looks of their own. Change any line from there; the page view, the PDF, Word and OpenDocument follow. The panel says when the document cites in a style whose looks it does not have.
• Paper shows the document on white A4 pages with its margins, as it prints, so you see where each page ends: a paragraph goes on at the top of the next page, a long table goes on row by row, the footnotes are at the foot of their page and the page numbers in the margin. Click a footnote at the foot of its page to write in it there, as in Word (Ctrl+I, Ctrl+B and Ctrl+U work in it; Enter or Esc leaves it, and one Undo takes the change back). The pages are drawn smaller when the window is narrow. Press it again for one long column. The choice is this computer's, not the document's.
• Book quotes a book straight from its own PDF or EPUB, without a note first: choose a book of your Library that has its file, find words in it (or go to a page with the arrows or by its number), select words on the page shown, and press Quote in the text (in quotation marks) or As a block quotation. They go where the cursor is, with the citation of that page. For a PDF, Show the PDF beside the document shows the book itself, page by page, next to your document, with your highlights: select words on its page and choose Quote in the text or As a block quotation; Highlight too also keeps the quoted words as a highlight in the book (it stays on until you turn it off). Text view goes back to the panel. Open in its own window (on the PDF’s bar, and at the top of the panel) opens the book in the reader in a window of its own, for a second screen.
• Find (the magnifying glass, or Ctrl+F) finds words in the document: every place is marked, the one you are at more strongly, and the bar says which of how many it is. Enter goes to the next place and Shift+Enter to the one before. Match case tells capitals apart, and Whole word finds “tone” but not “tones”. Ctrl+H (Cmd+Shift+H on a Mac) adds Replace with: Replace changes the place you are at and goes on, Replace all changes every place at once, and one Undo puts them all back. Esc closes the bar and leaves the place selected in the text. The words of footnotes and examples, kept in their own forms, are not searched.
• Outline lists the headings beside the document, indented by level and numbered as the document numbers them, the one you are in marked; click one to go there. Add a table of contents at the start puts the list in the document itself, under Contents: it follows the headings as you change them, a click on an entry goes to that heading, and in the paper view (and so in the PDF) each entry has its page. Hover over it to remove it. Word and OpenDocument files get a real table of contents with the headings already in it; Word offers to update it as the file opens, which adds the page numbers (in LibreOffice: right-click it and choose Update Index).
• Notes opens your notes beside the document. Quote it here puts a note in as a quotation, with its citation when the note is about a book and page; Open at p. 45 shows the book there, and Open the note opens it in the Notes tab.
• Versions: while you write, Voynich keeps an earlier version now and then (at most one every ten minutes, the newest 50). Look shows one; Put this version back brings it back, and what was there just before is kept as a version too, so nothing is lost. Compare with now shows what changed since that version, word by word: words added underlined in green, words taken out struck through in red, with how many of each.

Citations and the bibliography

Cite opens your Library: pick a book or article, type the page (“45” or “45-47”) if you like, and press Cite. The citation is written in the style chosen for the document, under Page: APA (7th edition), Chicago (author-date), MLA (9th edition), Harvard (as Cite Them Right has it, with a Reference list), the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics or IEEE, numbered: the first book you cite is [1], the next new one [2], and a page goes with its number, [2, p. 45]; the references are numbered the same, in the order first cited (IEEE is set by citeproc-js from the Citation Style Language’s own IEEE style, the way Zotero sets it). Changing the style rewrites every citation at once. The bibliography (References, or Works Cited in MLA) is made from the books you cite and stays under the text. In the list of books to cite, an IEEE document shows each book as “Odden 2005”, since its number only exists once it is cited; words copied from a book with Copy with citation take APA’s citation then, as a [1] means nothing outside its document. Click a citation to change its page, to remove it, or to Open the book at p. 45 (a PDF opens beside the document at that page; an EPUB in the reader). A new document takes the style you used last.

Footnotes and examples

• Footnote puts a numbered footnote where the cursor is; type its text, and click its number later to change it (or, in the paper view, click its words at the foot of the page). A footnote can have italics (a book’s title), bold and underlining: Ctrl+I, Ctrl+B, Ctrl+U or the buttons above its box, and every download keeps them. Footnotes are numbered in the order they appear.
• Example adds a numbered linguistic example: (1), (2) and so on, in the order they appear. Type the sentence, its gloss and a free translation. Write the gloss one item per word, with grammatical labels in capitals (1SG-PST-eat-FV food): each gloss stands under its word, and the labels are shown in small capitals, as the Leipzig Glossing Rules have it. A judgement (*, ?, ??, #, %) goes before the sentence. Add a line makes a set: (1a), (1b). Double-click an example, or press Edit, to change it.

Syntax trees

• Tree adds a syntax tree. Type it in labelled brackets, as linguists write them: [S [NP the cat] [VP [V sleeps]]]. A node is [Label ...] with nodes or words inside; a label ending in ^ draws a triangle over its words ([NP^ the big cat]). The drawing changes as you type, and the form says what is wrong when a bracket is missing or one too many. Done puts the tree in the text (words in italics), centred; double-click it or press Edit to change it.
• The PDF prints the drawing; the Word and OpenDocument files have it as a picture (made when you press Done); the LaTeX download writes it as a forest tree, which LaTeX draws itself. A tree can have a figure caption (Caption, Figure caption, with the tree selected).

Captions and cross-references

• Caption, Table caption puts a caption above the table the cursor is in (or at the cursor), and Figure caption one under the picture selected: a line that starts with Table 1. or Figure 1., then your words. Tables and figures are numbered in the order they come, and the numbers change by themselves when one is added, removed or moved.
• List of tables and List of figures (under Caption) put a list of their captions where the cursor is, kept up to date; a click on an entry goes to it. Hover over a list to remove it.
• Cross-ref puts in the number of an example, a table, a figure or a section, chosen from a list: (3), Table 2, Figure 1, or section 2.1 (when the headings are numbered; otherwise the heading’s title in quotation marks). Type the words around it yourself (“see (3)”, “as Table 2 shows”). The number follows what it points at, however things move; if that is deleted, it shows (?) in red.
• The PDF, Word, OpenDocument and Markdown files have the same numbers, as text.

Comments

• Select words and press Comment (or Ctrl+Alt+M, Cmd+Option+M on a Mac): the words are marked in the text, and the Comments panel opens beside the document, ready for what you want to say about them (“check the source”). Several comments can be on the same words.
• In the panel the comments are in the order of the text; click one to go to its words, or put the cursor in marked words to show their comment. Write a Reply under it (Enter), Resolve it when it is dealt with (its words then look as before, and Show the resolved ones brings it back to Reopen), or Delete it, which leaves the words. Your name is shown on your comments and replies (kept in this browser); without one they say “You”.
• Comments are kept with the document, in its versions, and Undo works on them as on the text. They are not printed and not in the PDF or Markdown files; Word files have them as Word comments (replies threaded under them, resolved ones marked done), and OpenDocument files as LibreOffice comments.

Suggesting changes

• Suggest (beside Comment) changes how you edit: what you type is kept as a suggestion to add (underlined in green) and what you delete stays in the text as a suggestion to take out (struck through in red), each with your name (Your name in the Comments panel) and the time. The button says Suggesting while it is on; press it again to write normally.
• Typing over selected words suggests taking them out and adding the new ones. Deleting words that are your own suggestion to add takes them out for good. New paragraphs, lists and headings are made as usual and not suggested, and Backspace at the start of a paragraph does not join it to the one before while suggesting.
• The Comments panel lists the suggestions under the comments, in the order of the text: click one to go to it, Accept or Reject it, or Accept all and Reject all. Accepting keeps the words added and takes out the words to take out; rejecting does the opposite. Undo takes any of it back.
• Word and OpenDocument files have suggestions as tracked changes (with the name and time), to accept or reject there. Markdown and LaTeX are written as if every suggestion were accepted. The PDF prints the pages as they are shown, suggestions marked, so accept or reject them first for a clean copy.

Sending a document for review

Someone with Voynich can comment on your document and suggest changes in their own Voynich, without an account or a server: the document goes by a file, as by email.

1. In your document choose Download, For review (.trackerreview) and send that file. It holds the document with its comments and suggestions, the books it cites and your name (from Your name, asked for if it is empty).
2. They open it in their Voynich with Import in Writing. It becomes a copy, … (review), with a note saying whose it is. Suggest is on in it, so what they type or delete is a suggestion; they add comments and reply to yours. Its citations are written from the books that came with it, though those are not in their Library.
3. They choose Download, Review file to send back and send you that file.
4. You open it with Import in Writing (it opens your document), or in the document with Bring in a review or a Word file at the foot of the Comments panel. Their new comments and suggestions come in as theirs, with their replies under your comments; a note says how many. Whatever you wrote in the meantime stays: each comment and change is found again by its words and the words around them. One about words that are no longer in your text is kept as a comment saying what it was, so nothing is lost. Bringing the same file in again adds nothing. Undo takes the whole review out again.

From Word. For a colleague without Voynich, download Word (.docx) and send it; they comment and change it in Word with Track Changes on. Bring the file they send back into your document with Bring in a review or a Word file: their tracked changes become their suggestions, and their comments (with replies, and done ones resolved) your comments, found in your text the same way. Changes to formatting in Word are not brought in.

Writing together live

Share live (at the top of a document) lets someone write in the document with you at the same time, from their own browser, through your computer: no account, nothing to install, and no server in between.

• Choose whether they may write and comment or only read, and press Start sharing. A link appears for each way to reach your computer: on the same Wi-Fi, and through Tailscale when you have it (for someone elsewhere: share this computer with their Tailscale account in Tailscale itself). Copy one and send it. The link is shown this once; for a new one, end the sharing and start again.
• They open it, give their name and write. Each of you sees the other’s cursor with their name, and the changes come together as you type, even in the same sentence. They have the toolbar, Paper, Suggest and Comments as you do, and see the references under the text; their citations come from the books the document cites.
• They see this one document and the books it cites, nothing else of yours: not your rooms, notes or other documents. Your computer has to be on and Voynich running while they write (the installed Voynich opens the same door your phone uses; see Your phone).
• Everything is saved in your document as it is written, and its earlier versions are kept as usual. If their connection drops, what they type meanwhile comes through when it is back.
• Share live again shows who is in. End sharing stops it at once: their link stops working and their page says the sharing has ended. A document put in the bin is no longer shared.

Writing together with members of a circle

In Share live, Share with members of a circle sends the document to the Voynich of members of one of your study circles, over the circle’s own encrypted connection: from anywhere, with no link and no Tailscale. Tick the members and choose for each Write and comment or Only read, then Share with them.

• They find it in Writing, under Shared with you (from whom, in which circle), and Open a copy: a document of their own, in the hall’s Writing, whose name comes from you.
• While you are both connected, the two copies stay in step as you type, cursors and comments included. What each of you writes while the other is away stays in your own copy and comes together the next time you are both connected; nothing is lost if either Voynich is closed meanwhile. Share live shows for each member whether they are in step, connected, or away.
• The books the document cites go with it (their details, never their files), so the member’s citations and references come out right; a book they cite from their own Library comes back to you the same way.
• Your Voynich takes changes only from members you shared it with to write; a copy to read cannot be written in.
• End sharing (for one member, or in the whole circle) tells them now, or when they are next connected. Their copy stays with them, to read, marked No longer shared; they can put it in the bin. Voynich cannot erase a copy on someone else’s computer. A document you put in the bin is no longer shared, and leaving a circle ends what you share in it.
• Two members reach each other directly or through a member who relays for the circle (as everything in a circle does). Both need Voynich 0.64 or later.

Downloading

• PDF opens the print window: choose Save as PDF. It prints the pages exactly as the paper view shows them (footnotes at the foot of each page, page numbers), with the fonts on your computer, so every script and every IPA symbol comes out as you see it. In the print window, leave the margins at their default (the pages bring their own).
• Word (.docx), OpenDocument (.odt) (the open format of LibreOffice and other programs) and Markdown (.md) download a file named after the title. In Word and OpenDocument, footnotes are real footnotes and an example is a table without lines, one word above its gloss. A picture in WebP format is left out of a Word file (Word cannot show it); PNG, JPEG and GIF go in.
• LaTeX, examples with gb4e or with expex downloads a .zip: document.tex, references.bib with the books you cite, and the pictures in figures/. The page settings, headings (numbered or not), lists, quotations, tables, footnotes, captions and the table of contents come across; citations are \parencite with their pages, in the biblatex style of your citation style; glossed examples are written for the package you chose, with grammatical labels in small capitals; syntax trees use forest. It is made for XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX (so every script and IPA symbol works as typed): run xelatex, then biber, then xelatex twice (MiKTeX fetches the packages it lacks the first time; with TeX Live they are there). The first lines of the file say which packages it needs. It uses the document’s font when the computer has it, and otherwise the first it has of Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium Plus, Noto Serif, DejaVu Serif, Cambria and Times New Roman, which all have the IPA. Fonts of single words, comments, and pictures in WebP or GIF format are left out.

14. The AI tab

Optional and off by default. Until you turn it on, the tab shows “The AI tab is off” and nothing is ever sent anywhere.

Turning it on

Settings, AI, Show the AI tab. Then choose an engine:

• Ollama (recommended for privacy): a free program from ollama.com (Download Ollama, shown while Voynich cannot find it, opens its own download page) that runs language models on your own computer. Install and start it, and Voynich finds it at the address shown (Where Ollama is running; the default is right unless it runs on another computer; if it cannot be reached, Voynich says so and has a check again link). Under Suggested for this computer Voynich recommends models that suit your computer’s memory and graphics card and can ask Ollama to download them, with a progress bar. Choose a Model that answers questions, a Model for Look up and quick jobs (a small, fast one is best: a model that thinks before it answers, such as deepseek-r1, takes half a minute or more a word, and Voynich warns you when Look up would use one) and, optionally, a Model that searches your notes (without one, Voynich matches words only; a multilingual one finds notes by meaning). Test the connection checks that they work. Nothing leaves your computer.
• An online service that works like OpenAI’s. Pick it under Service: Google Gemini, OpenAI, Mistral, OpenRouter, Groq, DeepSeek or LM Studio fill in their address and current models by themselves and say where a key comes from; Another service lets you type any address (most end in /v1). Then paste the Key (Save key, or Remove it again) and press Test the connection: it lists the models your key can use and, when a model is not found (a wrong name, or one the company has retired), names the nearest one it does offer, with the service’s own words beside Voynich’s. A service with no Search model finds notes by their words. When a service says “too many requests” while the index is updated (a free key allows only so many a minute), Voynich waits and goes on by itself, saying how long. Use this only if you accept that the text of your notes that the AI needs is sent to that company.

When your notes and books do not have the answer (Settings, AI): by default the AI answers from its own knowledge, and such an answer is labelled Not from your notes, cites nothing, and says to check it before you rely on it. Only my notes makes it say the answer is not in your notes instead, as it did before 0.72.

Ask your notes

Type a question. Voynich finds the pieces of your notes and books that match (it reads them in small pieces through a search index; Settings, AI, shows how many pieces are indexed across all your rooms and has Update the search index to bring the index of every room up to date), and the model answers from them first, naming its sources as numbered citations you can click to open the note (or, for a book prepared in the reader, the book at its page). If they do not contain the answer, it answers from its own knowledge with the label Not from your notes, or, with Only my notes, says so (see above). A question about your study time (“how many hours did I spend on Statistics this week?”) is answered from your real totals, not from the model’s arithmetic. Your conversations are listed so you can reopen, rename or delete them.

Ask, on every page

With the AI on, every page of a room has an Ask button at the bottom right. It opens the AI beside what you are doing, and it knows what you have open: the words you selected when you pressed it (a passage in the reader, a sentence in Writing), or else the note you opened on the Notes page or the document you are writing. A line at the top says what it is about; untick it to ask without it. Quick questions work on it: Explain this, Summarise, Quiz me (three questions, answers held back), Key terms, and in Writing Check the citations. Its conversations are the AI tab’s: saved and listed there. Esc closes it.

Keeping an answer

Under an answer, here and in the reader’s Ask tab, Save as a note keeps it as an ordinary note (the question as its title, the sources it cites listed under it; in the reader, about that book), and Make a flashcard makes a card of it.

Flashcards

Flashcards have a tab of their own (see Flashcards); the Flashcards button here goes there. With the AI on, Cards from your notes, by the AI in its Add cards tab picks a note (or the notes of a course or a book) and the model proposes cards you can edit, then save.

15. Your phone

Voynich can open on your phone, in the phone’s browser, while it runs on your computer. Your data stays on the computer: the phone shows it and changes it there. It is off by default, there is no account, and nothing goes through the internet or any company.

Turning it on and pairing a phone

1. In Settings, Circles and phone, Your phone, tick Use Voynich from your phone. The first time, Windows asks whether Node.js (Voynich) may use the network: allow it for private networks. A Mac asks whether to accept incoming connections: choose Allow.
2. Press Pair a phone. Voynich shows a QR code and a one-time code. The code works once, for ten minutes, and ends after five wrong tries.
3. With the phone on the same Wi-Fi, scan the QR code with its camera, open the address and press Pair this phone. (Or open the address shown and type the code.) Voynich opens on the phone.
4. To keep it like an app: on an iPhone, Share, Add to Home Screen; on Android, the browser’s menu, Add to home screen.

Your phones are listed under Paired phones; the bin button removes one, and it can no longer open Voynich until it is paired again. Unticking the box closes the way in at once; the phones stay paired for when you tick it again. This is part of the installed Voynich (started from its icon).

On the phone

On a phone, the tabs are in a bar at the bottom of the screen: Home, Library, Notes, Circles and More (Writing, Flashcards and Stats, and AI when it is on). It steps aside while you type. The top bar keeps the room, the search and Settings. Home and the timer, quick notes, flashcards and reading are made for a phone’s screen. In the reader, a page fits the width, you turn pages by scrolling (the page box still takes a page number), the notes open over the page with the panel button and close with the × (or when you go to a note’s page), and words selected with a finger get the same menu as with a mouse. Writing and the graph are better on the computer.

Flashcards with the computer off

Reviewing goes on when Voynich cannot be reached: the answers wait on the phone and are sent when it can be reached again (see Flashcards). Over your Wi-Fi this works while the review page stays open. To open Voynich on the phone with the computer off or far away, the phone needs an https address, which Tailscale can give this computer: in Tailscale’s admin console turn on MagicDNS and HTTPS Certificates, run tailscale serve --bg 3418 on this computer (the port Settings, Circles and phone, Your phone shows), and pair the phone with the https address that then appears under Address in the code. Each time the phone opens Voynich there, it keeps the flashcards due in every room; with no connection it shows them on a page of its own, ready to review. Settings, Circles and phone, Your phone says whether this is set up (Check again looks once more). Voynich only asks the Tailscale program on this computer what it serves; it changes nothing in it.

What follows you from browser to browser

Some choices follow you to every browser you use Voynich in, the phone included, within a few seconds: the timer while it runs (start it on the computer, stop it on the phone), the theme and your changes to it, the notes graph’s shapes, look, options and where its dots are, your own highlight colours and what each colour means, your own note templates, your shortcuts, the order of the reader’s notes, break reminders, Show cover pictures, the weeks estimate, Look up dropped books, the AI tab being on, and how Stats splits its bars. What belongs to one screen stays in its own browser: the text size, the reader’s zoom and panels, the paper view in Writing and the like. The choices that follow you are kept with your data on the computer, so the complete copy holds them too.

Away from home: Tailscale

Tailscale is a free app, made by another company, that links your own devices into a private, encrypted network from anywhere. Install it on the computer and on the phone (Download Tailscale in Settings, Circles and phone, Your phone, opens its own download page), sign in with the same account on both, and pair the phone with the Tailscale address (it starts with 100.), chosen under Address in the code. Voynich is not part of Tailscale and sends it nothing.

Keeping it safe

• Only paired phones get in. Any other device gets the pairing page and nothing else, and a request from another website is refused, as on the computer.
• A phone cannot quit Voynich, install updates, or pair and remove phones: those stay on the computer.
• On your own Wi-Fi the connection is not encrypted. On a shared network (a café, a library, a school), use Tailscale, which encrypts it.
• Lost a phone? Remove it in Settings, Circles and phone, Your phone.
• The computer has to be on, with Voynich running.

16. Study circles

A circle is a small private group (a few friends, a class, a language exchange) whose Trackers connect to each other directly. There is no server and no account: you join with an invite code, and whoever is online is the circle at that moment. A circle shows who is in it and who is online, the progress each member chooses to share with it, the decks they share and the books they read together, and it has channels: text channels to write in and voice channels to talk, share screens, turn cameras on and study in rounds (below). You can be in several at once (a book club, a language group, a class), each with its own invite code and its own members; none of them can see the others, or tell that you are in them. Everything about circles is in the hall, Circles (in the bar at the top of the hall and of every room).

The circle’s page

A circle’s page has four columns, as chat apps do. On the far left, your circles, each a round mark with its initials and a count of what is new; + under them makes or joins one. Beside them, the open circle: its name (press it for Invite people, Circle settings and Make a channel), then Decks and Files, then its text channels (#general first), its voice channels, with who is in each voice channel under it, and its Reading channels, one for each book the circle reads together. At the bottom, your name in this circle, with Mute, Deafen and the circle’s settings. In the middle, the channel open (its name and topic at the top); on the right, the member list: who is online, then who is not, each with what they are doing (studying now in a room, reading a book, online, or when they were last seen). The members button at the top hides it or brings it back. Press a member for their own page: their week day by day, each room they share, the readings they are in and where they are, the voice channel they are in, the decks they share (with Bring in), Nice work, and what they did lately. Your own page shows what the others see of you, with the choice of what you share beside it. The circle and channel open are remembered, and are in the page’s address, so they come back after a reload.

Channels

A circle starts with #general and two voice channels, Lounge and Study hall. Everything said in a circle before channels is in #general. The circle’s maker makes more with the + beside Text channels or Voice channels (or Make a channel in the circle’s menu): a name and, for a text channel, a topic (“chapter-3”: a text channel’s name is written in small letters, with dashes). The ... beside a channel, for the maker, has Edit channel, Move up, Move down and Delete channel (#general stays); a deleted channel’s messages are not shown any more, at anyone’s. In Circle settings, Anyone can make channels lets every member make them: a member’s new channel appears for everyone once the maker’s Voynich is online, and is shown in italics to them until then. Alt+↑ and Alt+↓ go to the text channel before or after, Ctrl+Alt+↑ and ↓ to the circle before or after, and Escape back to the channel from a member’s page or the settings.

A text channel shows its messages by day, each person’s name and time once for messages written together, and a red line where you were last there. #general also has short lines about what members did with the circle: a deck shared, or new cards in it; a reading started or joined, a stage of its plan reached, the book finished; a streak of 7, 30, 100 or 365 days; someone joining or leaving; and once a day, in the evening, each member’s study that day (“Deniz studied 1h 10m, 90 answers”), with Nice work on it and who said it. Nothing new is sent for these lines: each Voynich notes them itself from what members already share, so what you do not share makes no line. What was already there when you joined is not news: the lines start with what happens after.

What is new

Circles in the top bar counts the messages and lines from the others that you have not seen yet; each circle’s mark counts its own, and a channel with something new is bright, with a grey count. A message that mentions you makes the count red, with an @ on the channel, and its notice says who mentioned you and where. In Voynich’s other pages a small notice says when someone in a circle writes (with a link to its channel), or starts study rounds in a voice channel. The notices are only in Voynich, in this browser: nothing is sent anywhere for them. Turn them off in Circle settings, Notices (or Turn these off on a notice); the counts stay.

First steps, and the phone

A new circle shows its first steps in #general: invite someone (with a button that copies the invite code), choose what you share, and study together (in a voice channel, or a reading). Each is ticked once done, and the steps go when all three are (or with the cross).

On a phone the circles and channels are one screen (the menu button at the top), a channel fills the screen, and the member list opens over it. A phone shows who is in each voice channel, but talking needs Voynich on a computer for now (a phone reaches it over plain http, which browsers give no microphone).

Making a circle and inviting people

1. In the hall, Circles, type the circle’s name and your name in it, and press Make the circle (with circles already there, press Make under your circles first). The first time, Windows may ask whether Node.js (Voynich) may use the network: allow it, or members may not be able to reach this computer.
2. In the circle’s Circle settings, under Invite someone, press Copy and send the code to the people you want in the circle (a message to them is fine). Anyone with the code can join, so send it only to them.
3. They open the hall, Circles (Join under their circles if they are in one already), paste it, type their name and press Join.

Members, and who is online

Your circles are listed with how many members are online; press one to open it. Its list shows every member, a dot for who is online now, and when the others were last seen. Members find each other through a public directory and then connect directly, encrypted end to end; it can take a few seconds after Voynich starts. When two members’ networks cannot reach each other (often two phones’ mobile data), a member who reaches both passes the circle’s news on between them: the list then says online, through that member. With Help members connect through this computer on (it is, until you turn it off), such members also get a connection of their own through your computer, still encrypted: it passes it on without being able to read it, and only for members of this circle.

Sharing your progress

Nothing of yours is shared with a circle until you choose. In the circle’s Circle settings, What you share: tick the rooms (the hall is one of them) whose progress that circle may see. Each circle has its own choice, so the German group can see your German room and the book club the hall, and neither sees the other. For each room ticked, the circle sees its name and, for each of the last two weeks’ days, the minutes you studied there and how many flashcards you answered; with them, your streak (days in a row with either, counted from midnight) and the “nice work” you gave. Nothing else: no notes, no titles of what you studied, no books or cards. Under the rooms, What the others see of you shows it as they see it, and Exactly what is sent shows the very text sent.

Each member’s Voynich signs what it shares with that member’s own key, and members pass it on for each other, so you see a member’s progress even when you are never online at the same time as them (through a member who was), and nobody can change it on the way. It is brought up to date within two minutes of a change while Voynich runs; a member who is offline shows what they shared last, with As of when it was. Turning a room off sends the circle a card without it from then on; what members already saw stays with them.

Each member’s page shows today’s minutes and answers, the streak, this week day by day (Monday to Sunday) and each room they share. Nice work under a member says so on their day (today’s, or yesterday’s when they have not studied yet today); press it again to take it back. You see the “nice work” others gave you on your own page. There is no ranking: members are listed in the order the circle’s maker’s list has them, never by who studied most.

Sharing decks

One member makes the German or Chinese deck, and the whole circle studies it. In the circle’s Circle settings, What you share, choose a room and one of its decks (the decks inside it go with it) and press Share. The deck goes without your progress: every card is new for the others, and none of your answers, flags or suspensions go with it; its notes, note types, pictures and sounds do.

Under a member who shares a deck, the circle sees its name, how many cards and how big it is. Choose one of your rooms and press Bring in: the deck’s file is fetched from whoever in the circle has it (it is checked against the fingerprint on its maker’s card, so nobody can slip in another), and it comes in as an Anki deck does. After that, when its maker changes the deck, the change reaches you by itself within a few minutes while both Trackers run (or through a member who has the new version): new cards are added, and the notes its maker changed are updated. Your schedule and history stay yours, and an edit of your own to one of its cards stays unless its maker changes that same note. Stop updates keeps the cards as they are, as your own; Stop sharing (the maker’s) offers it no more. Cards its maker deletes stay with you.

Reading together

The circle reads the same book, each member in their own copy, by a plan. Press the + beside Reading in the channel list (Start a reading), then Start a reading, choose a book of your Library and write the plan: stages of a page and a day (“up to page 120 by Friday: Part 1”), as many as you like. The others see the book’s details and the plan, never the book itself, and choose Join with their own copy: a book of their Library, or Add it to my Library, which makes one from the details.

Each reading is a Reading channel of its own, under Reading, with a book beside its name: at its top, The reading (the book, the plan, everyone’s place, and Join), which folds away; below it, the channel’s own messages, as in a text channel, to talk about the book. Nobody has to make it: it comes with the reading, and goes when the reading ends (its messages then show in #general). Members on a Voynich older than 0.79 see its messages in #general.

In the reader. A book you read with a circle has a circle button in the reader’s bar, which says the plan’s next stage (“p. 120 by Fri”). Press it for everyone’s page and how far each is from that stage, and a link to the circle. A book read with more than one circle lists each. Books no circle reads have no button.

Each reader’s place is the current page of their own copy (as the Library and the reader keep it), so it follows their reading by itself, within a couple of minutes. Every reader sees everyone’s page, how far through they are, and how many pages they have to the plan’s next stage. When two copies have different page counts (another edition), a stage is counted by how far through the book it is. The reading’s starter can change the plan or end the reading; the others can leave it. The books stay in everyone’s Library.

Asking for files

In a circle’s Files (beside its channels), Ask for files asks the circle for 1 to 5 files: PDFs, EPUBs, or files of any kind (slides, a scan, a Word file), with a note saying what you are looking for (“Please send me a copy of Crime and Punishment, thanks”). Choose who gets what is sent: Only me, or The whole circle (anyone can then take a copy), and which room’s Library the PDFs and EPUBs go to. #general says what you asked for, and Files counts the others’ open requests.

A member who has the file presses Send under the request: a book of their Library that has a file of that kind, or a file of this computer (up to 500 MB). The file goes directly from their Voynich to yours, checked on arrival, like a shared deck; a file sent to you alone is handed to nobody else. When it arrives, a PDF or an EPUB becomes a book of the Library you chose, and any other file goes to Received, below the requests, to Open or Save. A request closes itself once as many files as it asked for have arrived, or press Close the request. The sender can Take back a file that has not been fetched yet, and Take off the list removes a received file (a book made of it stays). Send and ask only for files you may share: what goes between members is their own act, and it never leaves the circle.

Profiles

Each circle can see a profile of you, which shows nothing until you make it: open your own page (your name in the member list, or at the bottom of the channels) and press Make your profile. Write a line about yourself, and tick the books of your Library (up to 12) and the documents of your Writing (up to 8) to show. The others see a book’s title, authors and year, and whether you have its PDF or EPUB; an article’s title, its first lines and its length. Nothing else goes: no file, no notes. Each circle has a profile of its own (a book club may see your novels, a class your papers), and Copy from another circle fills one from another. The circles cannot tell they share a member: the same book has another name in each.

What you are doing now. In the same place, two ticks show the circle, under your name in its member list, the book open in your reader and its page (“reading Crime and Punishment, p. 120”) and the deck you are reviewing. Any book or deck, not only those on your profile. It shows only while you do it and goes a few minutes after you stop; nothing of it is kept. Both are off until you tick them, in each circle on its own.

On another member’s page, Ask for its PDF (or EPUB) beside a book, or Ask for a copy beside an article, asks them alone. They see it in their Files, with Send or Decline. A book’s file goes into your Library; an article arrives as a document of your own Writing, which you can change, with the books it cites added to your Library and its citations pointing at them.

Sending without a request. The circle’s maker can choose, in Circle settings, Files: Only in answer to a request (as every circle starts) or Anyone can send any file. In a circle open for sending, Files has Send a file: to everyone in the circle or to one member, a book of your Library or a file of your computer (up to 500 MB). The others see its name and size under Sent in the circle and press Get if they want it: a PDF or an EPUB goes into their Library, anything else into Received. A file sent to one member is handed to nobody else. The sender can Take back a file; a copy already fetched stays with whoever has it.

Your name, and the maker. Circle settings, Your name here, changes what the others in that circle call you (each circle has its own). Your phone is not a member of its own: it opens the Voynich on your computer, so in a circle you are one member whichever you use. A circle has one maker, who chooses its settings and adds and removes members: at first the person who made it. The maker can hand it to another member, on that member’s page, Make … the maker; the hand-over is signed with the maker’s key, so every member’s Voynich can trust it, and only the new maker can hand it on. Everyone in the circle needs Voynich 0.62 or later to see the new maker.

Quotations and passages

The highlighter button beside a text channel’s box opens Share highlights: choose a book of your Library, pick its highlights (by colour if you like, in page order, each with its note), and Send to the chat. Each becomes a quotation in the channel, with its colour, the book and the page. Only the words, the page and the book’s details go, never the file. When a member has the book (the copy they read with the circle, or the same book in their Library), Open in your copy opens it there.

On a book the circle reads together, Hand passages to read gives some of your highlights to one member who reads it too: they see them on the reading, each with Open and a tick for when they have read it, and you see how many they have read (or Take back). #general says so to the two of you only.

A quotation or a passage opens at its page and looks for its words there; when another edition has them elsewhere, the reader looks on the pages around it, and through the whole book, until it finds them. An EPUB looks through all its chapters.

Reading Together: highlights in everyone’s copy

Whoever starts a reading chooses Together or Each on their own. Each on their own shares only the plan and where each member is. In a Together reading, each member can also share their highlights and notes in the book: Share my highlights and notes here, on the reading or in the reader’s circle button. It is off until you turn it on, and it is yours alone: the others choose for themselves.

The others’ shared highlights show in your own copy, each member in their own colour; point at one to see who made it and their note. They are found by their words, so another edition of the book works too; what goes is only the words, the colour, the page in their copy and the note, never the book’s file. Keep some to myself, in the reader’s circle button, leaves any one of your highlights out. A new highlight follows by itself within half a minute; one you delete goes from the others’ copies too.

Writing in a channel

In a text channel, write in the box at the bottom (“Message #general”) and press Enter (Shift+Enter for a new line); it goes to that channel only. The microphone button beside it records a voice message of up to two minutes: a red sign says the microphone is on until you press Stop; then you listen to it, and Send or Throw away. Nothing goes before Send. Every member’s Voynich gets the recording from whoever has it (a member who was away gets it later) and keeps it as long as the circle keeps its messages; members on an older Voynich see a line saying it is a voice message. A phone opens Voynich over plain http, which browsers give no microphone, so record on the computer (the phone plays them). Every member’s Voynich keeps the messages for as long as the circle’s maker chose (a week, 30 days, a year or for good; 30 days unless they change it), and members who were away get them from whoever is online when they come back. A message is signed by its writer, so nobody can write in someone else’s name, and it cannot be taken back once sent. A member on Voynich 0.76 or older sees every channel’s messages in its one chat, and what they write is in #general, until they update.

Replies, mentions, reactions and pins. Point at a message (or press Tab to it, or tap it on a phone) for three buttons. Add a reaction offers eight (👍 ❤️ 😂 😮 😢 🎉 ✅ 👀); they show under the message with how many, and pointing at one says who. Press one of yours again to take it back. Reply puts “Replying to” above the box; the reply shows the start of what it answers, and pressing that goes to it. Pin pins the message for everyone in the circle (anyone can pin, and unpin); the pin at the top of the channel lists what is pinned in it. To mention someone, type @ and the start of their name, then choose them from the list (Enter or Tab): the message is marked in their chat, and counted in red for them. Members on a Voynich older than 0.79 see a reaction or a pin as a short message saying so (“reacted 👍”), a reply as a plain message, and a mention as the words written.

Images and files in the chat. These are the circle’s maker’s choice, off unless chosen: in Circle settings, Files, the third choice, Anyone can send any file, also directly in the chat. Where it is off there is no +, nothing can be sent, and what is already in the chat shows as a plain line naming it, until the maker turns it on again. Where it is on, the + at the start of the box adds them; you can also paste a picture into the box or drop files on the channel. They wait above the box until you press Send, and each goes as a message of its own, which cannot be taken back. An image (PNG, JPEG, WebP or GIF, up to 20 MB) shows to the others blurred, from a very small preview that travels inside the message, until they press Download. It then comes from any member who has it, and is sharp; pressing it shows it larger, with Save. So everyone in the circle does receive that small blurred preview, and only those who press Download receive the image. If no member who has it is online, it says it is waiting, and comes when one is. Any other file (up to 500 MB) shows as a card with Get, then Save. Files never open in Voynich from the chat: they are saved, so nothing a member sent can run. All of this also shows in the circle’s Files, under In chat, and goes when its message goes, by the circle’s choice of how long messages are kept. A copy already saved outside Voynich stays. Delete for me: the small bin on an image or a file takes it out of your chat and its file off your computer, after asking. It does not come back, and the others keep theirs. If you were the only one with the file, those who had not downloaded it can no longer get it. The message itself, with its small preview, stays hidden in your Voynich until its time is up, so that you can still pass the message on to members who were away. Members on an older Voynich see a line naming the image or file, and cannot get it or pass it on.

Voice channels

Press a voice channel to join it: you are in it, the others in the circle see you under it, and your microphone is open, as in Discord. Press it again to see the call. The call shows everyone in the channel as a tile (their camera, or their initials), with a green ring round whoever is talking and a sign for who is muted or deafened. Its bottom bar has Camera, Share your screen, Study rounds, Mute, Deafen and Leave voice. Mute sends nothing until you unmute; Deafen also lets you hear no one (and mutes you); Mute while deafened undeafens and unmutes. Both are also at the bottom of the channels, beside your name, and the others see them. Point at someone’s tile to mute them for you alone. While you are in a voice channel, Voice connected above your name says which, with Disconnect, and Camera and Screen, which open the call. Nothing of the talk is recorded or kept.

If you use speakers without headphones, or are in a noisy room, choose Hold to talk in Circle settings, Voice (on this computer, for every circle): the microphone then sends only while you hold V (not while typing, and not on the flashcards pages, where V plays the card’s sound) or the Hold to talk (V) button in the bottom bar. With speakers and an open microphone the others may hear themselves; headphones avoid it.

Noise suppression. Also in Circle settings, Voice, for what the others hear from your microphone: Strong, the choice to begin with, takes out a laptop’s fan, hum and a noisy room, between your words and under them, as well as steady hiss (it is RNNoise, a small neural network that runs on your own computer, before your voice is sent); Standard is the browser’s own suppression only, for steady hiss (try it if Strong cuts the ends of your words); Off takes out nothing, for music or a good microphone in a quiet room. A change takes effect at once, in a call too. If Strong cannot start in your browser, Voynich uses Standard and says so there. Test your microphone, below them, records five seconds of you and then plays them back as the others hear you, with the suppression chosen; it records first and plays after, so speakers cannot howl, and it is not offered while you are in a voice channel. Hear yourself, beside it, plays your microphone to you live, as you talk, until Stop hearing yourself: use headphones (on speakers you would hear an echo), and change Strong, Standard or Off while you listen to hear the difference at once. It leaves out the call's compression, which the recorded test has, and stops when you close the settings.

Study rounds. Anyone in a voice channel can press Study rounds and Start now: 25 minutes of study and a 5-minute break unless you change them, as many rounds as you like. Everyone in the channel sees the same countdown at the top of the call, and the time left shows beside the channel in the list, at everyone’s (worked out from the same start, so nothing has to keep it in step). Anyone in it can stop them (Stop the rounds), and they go on when whoever started them leaves. The maker can set a voice channel to Talk only in breaks (Edit channel): while its rounds run, talking, cameras and screens wait for the breaks, and everyone still hears the room. And while your timer runs in a room you share with a circle, the circle sees “studying now” beside your name, with that room’s name and since when.

Cameras. In a voice channel, Camera opens a preview of yourself that only you see; nothing is sent until you press Turn on. Then your picture goes to the others in the talk, as it happens, and a red sign names who sees you; Camera again (or Turn off on Voynich’s other pages) lets the camera go, and so do leaving the voice channel and the end of a break in a channel that talks only in breaks. The camera’s light is on exactly while Voynich has it. The others’ cameras are on their tiles, with full screen on each, and small in a corner on Voynich’s other pages. Hide cameras takes no one’s: it spares your line, and you still hear everyone. Each picture is shown when that person’s voice from the same moment is heard, so lips and words go together; on a slower line your picture gets smaller (720p, then 540p, then 360p) before it gets fewer frames, and each person gets what their own line allows. Cameras are for up to five people in a voice channel: with more, the talk goes on without them. Everyone sends a copy to each of the others, so your upload decides how sharp your picture is: it takes about 0.7 megabits a second of upload for each of the others (about 3 for a call of five), and more for a sharp picture. On less, your picture breaks or does not reach them, and a full upload slows what comes to you too, so on a slow line keep your camera off. Nothing is recorded or kept. It needs Chrome, Edge or Brave on a computer (with graphics acceleration on: in Brave, Settings, System), and everyone in the channel on Voynich 0.77 or later; the red sign names anyone who cannot take your picture, and they still hear you.

Sharing your screen. In a voice channel, Share your screen in the bottom bar asks how: Sharp for reading (full size, up to 2560x1440, up to 30 frames a second) or Smooth for anything moving (60 frames a second, up to 1920x1080), and With its sound for a tab’s sound, or the whole computer’s where the browser offers it (a window has none; it never carries Voynich’s own sound, so the voices do not go back out). Choose what to share opens the browser’s own picker: a whole screen, one window or one tab. Nothing is sent until someone presses Watch, and then only to them. While you share, a red line says who watches; Stop sharing (or the browser’s own) ends it, and so does leaving the voice channel. Everything on what you share is seen, notifications that pop up on it too. One person shares in a channel at a time. When someone shares, the others see LIVE with Watch: the screen opens large in the call, with the tiles under it, full screen, and, when there is sound, its volume; on Voynich’s other pages it is small in a corner. On a slower line the picture gets smaller (Smooth) or has fewer frames a second (Sharp) rather than breaking; each viewer gets what their own line allows. It needs Chrome, Edge or Brave on a computer, and goes only to members on Voynich 0.77 or later whose connection can carry it.

Voice stays with you. Once you are in a voice channel, you stay in it through every page of Voynich: a small Voice connected panel in the corner says who is talking, with Mute, Deafen and Disconnect, a red sign while your camera is on, and the channel’s name to go back to the call. You leave it with Leave voice or Disconnect, by joining another voice channel (one at a time, in every circle), or by closing or reloading the window. Voice channels need Chrome, Edge or Brave, and everyone in them on Voynich 0.77 or later: members on 0.76 or older do not see the channels at all, and cannot hear or be heard in them. Their study rooms and discussion rooms are not shown in 0.77; ask them to update.

How it sounds: in a test network with homes 30 ms apart, the voice took about 50 ms from one member to another, or 80 ms through a member who relays; on lines that lose packets the circle resends them, so Voynich waits up to a quarter of a second before playing when it has to, and nothing came too late even with 5% lost. Real homes have not been measured yet.

Removing someone, and leaving

Only the person who made the circle can remove a member (the bin button beside them). The circle then gets a new key and a new invite code, which the removed member never receives, so their Voynich can no longer connect to it, and it is told it was removed. Members who were away get the new key from the first member they meet. What someone already saw stays with them. Leave (with the circle’s name, inside it) removes that circle from your Voynich and tells its members; your other circles go on; if you made it, it goes on for them, but nobody can remove anyone from it any more.

What a circle sends

Only while you are in a circle and Voynich is running. To find the members, Voynich joins a public directory that many apps share (Hyperswarm’s, first through three addresses run by the project that makes it); the directory sees that a computer joined and the circle’s meeting place, a scrambled form of its key, never the key itself. Members see each other’s internet addresses, as in any direct connection. What goes between members is your name in the circle, who is in it and who is online, the progress you chose to share with that circle, the decks you share with it, the details and your page of the books you read with it, your messages and voice messages, the voice channel you are in (with your mute, deafen and camera, and its study rounds), and whether you are studying now in a room you share with it (above). Only what you choose besides: your profile and what you are doing now, files you send, quotations and passages, your highlights in a Together reading where you turn sharing on, documents you share with members (to them alone), and your voice while you are in a voice channel and not muted (to those in it, never kept). Nothing else of yours (other notes, books, sessions, cards) is reachable through a circle: a circle runs in a small program of its own that answers only circle messages. The circle’s key is left out of complete copies and exports; after putting a copy back on another computer, join again with an invite.

When something seems wrong

Everything a circle does is written to Voynich’s log, one line each, with the time: when it starts, who connects and how (directly, or through another member), who disconnects, when this computer’s network changes (another Wi-Fi, waking from sleep), new keys, and connections it refused. Settings, About and updates shows where the log is. Members are named as they named themselves, never by their internet address, so you can send the log to someone helping you. A member whose computer is switched off or loses its connection shows as disconnected only after a short while, when the connection times out; leaving and being removed show at once.

Sync your computers

With two or more computers of your own (a desk PC and a laptop, say), Voynich can keep them the same, over the same network as circles: no account, no server, no cloud folder. In Settings, Circles and phone, Sync your computers: on the first, give it a name and press Start syncing from this computer; it shows an invite. On the other, give it a name, paste the invite and press Join. The invite is for your own computers only: whoever has it gets a copy of everything.

• What syncs: rooms with their courses and activities, notes and their links, books (details, covers and files), highlights, documents and their versions, flashcards with their notes, pictures, sounds and every answer, study sessions, the AI tab’s chats and canvases. What stays on each computer: keys and passwords, settings, study circles, the phone’s pairing, and the AI’s search index (each computer makes its own).
• When: whenever both computers are on, a change on one reaches the other within about half a minute. A computer that was closed catches up when it is opened again. The first sync of two full computers can take longer: books’ files go a few hundred megabytes at a time.
• Courses and activities with the same name in the same room are one, not two, even though each computer made its own.
• Changed on both while apart: the newer change wins, row by row (a card, a book’s details, a session). A note or a document changed on both computers while they were apart keeps both: the newer stays, and the other is kept beside it as “(the other version, date)”, on both computers, once.
• Safety: the first time changes come from another computer, a copy of your data is saved first (Settings, Data). Changes from another computer are brought in all at once or not at all, and a trouble is shown there in words.
• The section lists your computers, whether each is on now, how many of this computer’s changes each has not had yet, and what the last sync brought. Stop syncing here stops it; what came stays.
• Two computers that both brought in the same Anki deck before they were paired show its cards twice (they were made separately); delete one copy (Flashcards, Browse, find duplicates). A phone away from home cannot sync (it would need a Voynich app of its own); at home it opens Voynich on the computer as before. The Mac joins when its version catches up.

17. Themes and looks

Settings, Look, Theme offers eleven themes, plus Custom:

• Midnight (the default dark one), Black, Light, Forest and Rose.
• Folio and Folio Night: paper and green ink, light and dark, with titles in a book face (IM Fell English), text in Public Sans and numbers in JetBrains Mono. The three fonts come with Voynich, so they work offline.
• Aero Sky (called Frutiger Aero before 0.57): bright sky, glass panels, bubbles at the window’s edges and green hills. Aero Aurora: its dark sister, green glass under the northern lights, with glossy bars. With thanks to the Frutiger Aero community for keeping the style alive; the look is drawn in Voynich’s own styles.
• CCRU: black and phosphor green, after the cover of Ccru Writings 1997–2003, with the Numogram in the left margin of the page (it steps back in a narrow window, and does not show on a phone). The drawing is by Liza Desyatkova, Hijinx World, in the public domain (CC0).
• TempleOS: a white page, blue text, double lines and the 16 colours of TempleOS, with its square 8 by 8 letters (taken from TempleOS itself, which is in the public domain) in the bars, tabs, buttons and titles. Notes, books and documents keep plain letters; Customize, Font, TempleOS square, everywhere puts them on all the text.

• Text size (above the themes): Small, Normal or Large for the whole app, in every theme. It is kept in this browser only, so a phone can have its own.
• Customize (under the themes) changes any theme’s colours one by one, the font (the theme’s own, a system font, or one you name), this theme’s text size (on top of the Text size above) and how round the corners are. Everything shows on the page at once. A small button puts any colour back; Reset restores the theme.
• If the colours you pick make some text hard to read, a warning says which text and how far off it is. Every built-in theme passes the standard readability rule (WCAG AA).
• Custom starts from the colours of any theme you pick and lets you build your own.
• Theme and look apply to every room and are the same in every browser you use, your phone too. Show cover pictures (Settings, Reading, Library) hides or shows book covers everywhere.

The pages also fit a narrow window or a small screen:

18. Backups, exports, moving

Where your data is

Everything (sessions, notes, books, highlights, pictures and covers) is in one file, tracker.db, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Voynich\data (paste that into the File Explorer address bar; on a Mac, ~/Library/Application Support/Tracker/data). Saved copies are in its backups folder, and the PDF and EPUB files you attached to books in its books folder. Settings, Privacy lists all the places for your computer.

Saved copies

• Voynich saves one copy automatically each day and keeps the last 14. Back up now makes one on request; those are kept until you remove them.
• Voynich also saves a copy by itself before something risky, and labels it in the list: Before a restore, Before an update (when a new version has to change the database) and Before a delete (deleting a room). The list also shows Automatic, Manual, Export file and Other file entries.
• Restore... on a saved copy shows what is in it (rooms, sessions, hours, notes, books) next to what you have now, and asks you to confirm. Everything you have now is replaced by the copy, including its settings; keys you saved on this computer are kept unless the copy has its own. Your current data is saved first as Before a restore, so a restore can be undone. A copy from an older version is brought up to date; one from a newer version is refused (update Voynich first).
• Those copies live on the same computer as your data. Now and then copy the folder to a USB stick or cloud drive.
• Book files are not in the saved copies (so the daily copies stay small). Notes, highlights and which file belongs to which book are. After restoring a copy on a computer without the files, each book asks for its file again.

Importing a file

Import from a file..., next to Back up now, lets you pick a complete copy (.db) or a readable-data zip from anywhere on your computer, for example one made on another computer or kept on a USB stick. Voynich keeps a copy of it in the list of saved copies, shows what is in it next to what you have now, and replaces nothing until you confirm. A file that does not start like one of Voynich’s own files is refused, and a file that is a database but not Voynich’s is explained in the preview.

Add to what I have (next to the button that replaces everything) adds what is in the file instead: its rooms, sessions, notes, books, cards, documents and the rest join yours, and nothing you have is replaced or doubled. What is in both (because one came from the other) is kept once; a room with the same name is the same room; a course or activity with the same name in the same room becomes one. Your settings, saved keys and on-screen choices stay as they are. It says what it added, and your data from just before is kept as Before a restore, so this can be undone too.

Taking your data with you

Your documents in Writing, and their earlier versions, are part of your data: the daily copies, the complete copy and the readable data hold them.

All three downloads cover all your rooms. Your saved keys (AI, book search) are left out of the complete copy and the zip on purpose, so the files are safe in a cloud drive.

Moving to another computer

Install Voynich there, make a complete copy or a zip here (with Include my books if you read books in Voynich), and on the new computer press Import from a file... and pick it (see below). Or, with Voynich closed on both, copy the whole %LOCALAPPDATA%\Voynich folder (~/Library/Application Support/Tracker on a Mac).

If the data file is damaged

After a crash, a power cut or a disk problem the file can become unreadable. Voynich then still starts, says so in plain words, and lists the healthy saved copies it found with what each holds. Use this copy puts one in place; the damaged file is not deleted but moved to a damaged folder next to your data. Anything you added after that copy was made is not in it.

19. Updates

• Settings, About and updates also has a link to this manual, to the terms of use, the contact address and the GitHub issues page. They are links you click; Voynich sends nothing by itself.
• Send feedback (in About, and on the page Voynich shows when something breaks) is for telling the maker about a problem or an idea, in English or Turkish. Write what happened; under it you see everything that goes with it: the version, the computer’s system and, unless you untick it, the last lines of the log, with your home folder written as ~. Read it first: the log can hold words of something you were saving. Open in my email starts a new email in your own email program, which you send yourself; Copy puts it all on the clipboard, for any email. If it is too long for an email link, the email starts with the first part and Voynich says to paste the whole text from Copy.
• Check now asks whether a newer version exists. It is the only thing that contacts anyone unless you turn the next option on.
• Check for updates once a day (off by default) does the same by itself, once a day.
• When a newer version exists, Update now downloads it from GitHub (about 45 MB), checks that it is the file signed for Voynich, saves a copy of your data, closes Voynich, installs it and opens Voynich again; the page reloads by itself. Your data stays as it is. One press does all of it: the progress shows while it downloads.
• Install updates by itself (off by default) downloads a newer version in the background and installs it the next time Voynich starts. It also turns on the daily check. The About page shows the download as it goes and then Install now, to install it at once instead; Update now pressed while it downloads installs it as soon as it is ready.
• Only an update signed with Voynich’s own key is ever installed automatically, and the program that runs the installer checks that signature (and the file’s checksum) again before it runs anything. An update that is not signed is announced with a link, and you run it yourself.
• You can always update by hand: download the newest Voynich-Setup.exe and run it. It closes Voynich, installs over it and keeps your data. On a Mac: quit Voynich and drag the Voynich from the newest Tracker-Mac.dmg onto the Applications folder. (On a Mac, Update now works only when Voynich is in a folder you can change, such as Applications.) (Versions before 0.3.0 cannot update themselves; install 0.3.0 or later by hand once.)
• Each release lists a SHA-256 checksum. In PowerShell, Get-FileHash .\Voynich-Setup.exe should show the same number; on a Mac, shasum -a 256 Tracker-Mac.dmg in Terminal.

20. Privacy

Your sessions, notes, books, the PDFs and EPUBs you read and pictures stay on your computer. These are the only things that can leave it, and only when you use them:

There are no analytics, crash reports, accounts or advertising. Fonts and icons are part of the program. The reader shows a book from Voynich itself: a PDF or EPUB cannot make your browser fetch anything from elsewhere, and an EPUB’s scripts never run. Inside Voynich, Settings, Privacy shows this list again with your settings (“Right now”), the sites each item talks to, how to stop it and where everything is kept, and a test checks that list against the program’s code.

21. Keyboard and accessibility

• Everything can be done with the keyboard: Tab and Shift+Tab move between controls, Enter or Space press them, and the focus shows as a ring in the theme’s colour.
• Press ? on any page (outside a text box) for its keys: the page’s own first (studying cards, a circle, the reader, notes), then the ones that work everywhere.
• Windows that open on top (New room, adding a book, Cite, studying flashcards, Search everything and the others) keep Tab inside them and close with Esc.
• In a list with a grip (courses, activities, notes), focus the grip and press Up or Down to move the item. On touch screens it becomes two small arrow buttons. Rooms in the room menu are moved with the Move up and Move down buttons in Settings, This room.
• Search everything: Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on a Mac), / outside the reader, or the magnifying glass in the top bar. Type to find your notes, books, documents and flashcards, the words of your highlights and text boxes in every book (Highlights and text boxes, opening the book at one), or the name of a tab to go there; the arrow keys choose and Enter opens. With three letters or more it also searches inside your books (In your books): each place found says the book and the page (or chapter) with the words around it, and opens the reader there with the words marked. A book is searchable once its words have been read: Make them searchable at the foot of the results reads the books that are not yet, on this computer, a moment each (it goes on from where it stopped, and nothing is sent anywhere). A book prepared for questions in the reader’s Ask tab already is.
• Ctrl+Enter saves a note. In the reader, Page Down and Page Up turn the page and / searches the book. These and the graph’s shortcuts can be changed in Settings, Shortcuts.
• Every button and field has a name a screen reader can read, each page has a heading, and error messages are announced when they appear.
• Text in every built-in theme meets the WCAG AA contrast of 4.5 to 1, and the theme editor warns about colours that do not. Calendar squares are at least 24 pixels wide, and so is every button that is only an icon (44 on a touch screen).
• The graph’s animation follows your computer’s “reduce motion” setting unless you choose otherwise.

What has not been done: it has been checked with automated tools and by keyboard, but not yet with a real screen reader. If something does not work for you, write to clite.ka@gmail.com or open an issue on GitHub.

22. Troubleshooting

23. Questions

24. Words used