Capture your first page

The fastest way to understand Surfc is to make your first capture. These steps walk you through photographing a page and turning it into an indexed note.

Step 1: Open the camera

From the Home screen, tap Start Capturing. (From any other screen, the camera icon in the bottom navigation does the same thing.) Surfc will ask for camera permission the first time — allow it.

You'll see a live viewfinder with a shutter button at the bottom.

Step 2: Frame your page

Point your camera at the page or note you want to capture. Good light matters more than a steady hand — natural light or a desk lamp beats overhead fluorescents.

Print pages

On printed pages, Surfc only extracts text you've marked up — underlines, highlights, and handwritten annotations. Unmarked body text is ignored. If you haven't annotated the page yet, do that first.

Tap the shutter button when you're ready.

Step 3: Review the transcription

After the photo is taken, Surfc sends it to the AI transcription engine. Within a few seconds you'll see the transcribed text appear beneath the image.

Read through the transcription. It's usually accurate, but handwriting and unusual typefaces can trip it up. Edit the text directly in the field to make corrections.

TIP

You can also skip the photo entirely and enter a note manually. From the capture screen, tap the pencil icon to switch to text entry.

Step 4: Assign a source

Every note belongs to a source — the book, article, or document it came from. Tap Source and either:

• Select a book you've already added to your library, or
• Type a new title to add it on the spot.

Adding a page number is optional but worth doing. It's the difference between "I captured something about justice" and "I can find it again in thirty seconds."

Step 5: Tag ideas and save

Surfc will suggest one or more Ideas the note connects to (more on this in Idea Discovery). Suggestions are applied by default — tap any chip to remove one you don't want, then tap Add to Commonplace.

Your note is now part of your Commonplace — your personal collection of everything worth keeping. The name nods to the centuries-old commonplace book, the notebook scholars and readers kept to gather quotes, passages, and reflections in one place; Surfc keeps yours and surfaces the threads between entries as it grows.

What happens next

The note appears in your Commonplace, tagged to its ideas and linked to its source. You can find it again by browsing Ideas, searching by keyword, or navigating to the source in your Library.

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Next: How ideas work — learn what Ideas are and why they're the heart of Surfc.