MySummaries

Editing a board

Sections, layout, the pen tray, the two modes, and the two ways back — undo and restore points.

Everything on a board is editable, including the parts the AI wrote. A board you have not corrected is a board that will examine you on somebody else's words.

Sections#

Each card is one section: a heading and a body of paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists, sub-headings and tables. Click a card to type in it; only the card you are in is a live editor, the rest stay as they read.

While a card is open, a toolbar floats above it. The left half is ordinary formatting — bold, italic, underline, a highlight, bullets, numbers, a sub-heading, insert an image. The right half spends a model call:

  • Complete — write the rest of this section from its heading and what you have typed.
  • Shorter — condense to the essentials.
  • Format — tidy the formatting without changing the content.
  • Check — look for anything factually wrong or out of date.
  • Translate — into another language.

Highlight some lines first and they act on those lines only; with nothing selected they act on the whole section. Either way the result arrives as a diff — every added and removed line with a tick beside it — and nothing changes until you apply what you kept.

+ Add on the bar makes the other three things a board holds: a table card, an area heading, and a page break that starts a fresh stack below it.

Layout#

Drag a card by the bar at its head to move it; drag its right edge to make it span more than one column. The column count is a property of the board, and an area heading may set its own count for everything below it.

Sort by asks for other arrangements of the same cards — the same notes regrouped under new headings, nothing rewritten. If you do not like one, Back to your own layout puts every card, heading and page break back where you had it.

Modes#

The switch at the head of the bar has two positions, and it belongs to the board rather than to you or to your device — a half-written board stays in Edit while the finished one beside it stays in Study.

  • Edit — write and arrange. Cards are editable, they drag and resize, the scratchpad opens, undo works.
  • Study — the board locks. Nothing moves under a stray click, text selects for the pen tray, and the four study surfaces, Progress and the AI tools become available. They all read a finished board, which is why they wait for this mode.

Edit mode is deliberately loud: the bar carries a wash and the whole board an inset ring, because it is a state a board can sit in for days.

On a phone or a narrow window a board is always in Study mode. Arranging cards is a pointer job — dragging between columns, dragging an edge, an inline editor — and none of the three has a usable touch equivalent.

Pen tray#

In Study mode, select text on any card and a small tray appears under it.

  • Four pens. A highlight is stored in the note itself, so it syncs, it undoes, and it survives later editing of that section. Click an existing mark to recolour or remove it. An AI rewrite of the section is the one thing that drops its highlights: the model returns new text.
  • Explain. One short answer about the phrase you selected, in the context of the section it sits in. Past about sixty words of selection the button says Summarise instead, because an explanation capped at sixty words cannot be longer than the thing it is explaining. It is the fastest call on the board — it is meant for a word you did not know, mid-read.
  • Snap decides what a selection takes: with it on, a click takes the whole sentence and a drag across a boundary takes whole sentences, while a drag kept inside one sentence stays exactly as you made it.
  • Auto play reads whichever block you click aloud, in the browser's own voice. There is a speaker on each section head too, for the whole section.

Rewriting and translating a selection are on the card's own toolbar in Edit mode, above — the tray is for reading a locked board, not for changing it.

Maths#

Formulae are written as LaTeX, in the text itself: \( ... \) for inline maths and $$ ... $$ for a display equation on its own line. Single-dollar delimiters are not used.

They render as soon as the card is not the one being edited, so you type source and read typeset maths. The source is what is stored, which is why a formula copies, diffs, translates and syncs like any other text — and why anything the AI writes for you, cards and papers included, uses the same two delimiters.

History#

There are two ways back, and they cover different distances.

Undo (⌘Z, or the arrows on the edit bar) walks back through the changes you have made in this tab — up to sixty of them, structural changes included. Reloading the page ends that stack: it describes a document that may since have changed on another device.

History, beside the undo arrows, is the long way back. The board is snapshotted automatically as you work — at most one restore point every fifteen minutes, kept for thirty days, thinned to one a day once they are older than two days. Restoring puts the notes back as they were on that date, takes the board's flashcards back with them, and deletes the papers set on this board since — so it is worth reading the confirmation, which counts all three. It snapshots what it replaced first, so a restore is itself reversible.