Documents and Websites

Not everything worth keeping starts as a note you typed. A paper, a contract, a manual, an article on the web: Culma brings these in as documents, notes you can read, search, link and draw on.

A document is a whiteboard whose pages are pictures. The original is rendered once, exactly as it is, and never changes underneath your marks. The file you added is kept untouched in the vault's assets folder.

Adding a PDF

Click the + next to All notes or any folder and choose Add document…, then pick a PDF. Or drag a PDF from your file manager onto the sidebar, or onto a folder in it.

The note appears at once, named after the document, and its pages arrive one by one, the first page first. Start reading while the rest are being made; a long book takes a while, and you can keep working meanwhile.
Where you drop decides what happens. A PDF dropped onto an open note is embedded in that note, as before. Dropped onto the sidebar, it becomes a document.
Drop several at once and they are added one after another.
Rename a document from the right-click menu, like any other note.

Reading

Pages are laid out in a column. Scroll through them, and Ctrl+scroll to zoom.
The arrows in the toolbar step through the pages. Click the reading between them, such as 3 / 214, type a page number and press Enter to jump there.
With nothing selected, Page Down and Page Up turn the pages, and Home and End go to the first and the last.
Ctrl+F finds words on the pages and takes you to each hit.
The text of every document is in the vault's search. Ctrl+K finds it by its words and by its meaning, like any other note (see Finding Things).
Only the pages near where you are looking are drawn, so a 400-page book stays quick.

Marking it up

Every whiteboard tool works on a page. The Marker (M) is made for documents: a wide, translucent stroke that reads like a highlighter and leaves the words underneath readable. Use the pen, arrows, shapes and text for notes in the margin.

Pages are locked. You can't change what's on a page, but you can move pages around, side by side to compare two, say. Whatever you drew on a page moves with it.
Link a page to a note by typing [[ in any text on the canvas. The document then shows up in that note's backlinks.
Every mark is kept in Version history, like every other change.

Adding a website

Choose Add website… from the same + menu, type an address and press Open. The page opens in your browser. When it looks the way you want it, signed in, the cookie banner dismissed, the right tab chosen, press the Culma button in your browser's toolbar.

The page lands in your vault as a document: one tall page, as wide as your browser window, exactly as you were reading it. Its text is searchable, and you can mark it up like a PDF.

This needs the Culma browser extension, which is what takes the picture. The first time, the page Culma opens tells you where to get it.

Connect it once. In Culma, open Preferences → Browser and press Connect browser extension. A page opens in your browser and hands the extension this machine's key. If the browser doesn't let it, paste the key shown in Preferences into the extension's options instead; Firefox always needs the paste.
After that, the button is enough. You don't have to start from Add website…: press the Culma button on any page you're reading.
Culma fetches nothing itself. What you keep is the page as you had it in front of you, not a fresh download of the address with its banners back up.
The extension can also send pages to Culma running in a browser tab. Enter that address in the extension's options.

Adding documents and websites is a desktop feature for now. Once added, a document syncs to every device and opens there like any other note.

Next: Finding Things