2. Add your first sources

Vademecum learns from material you choose: guidelines, lecture slides, review articles, your own notes. It reads PDF, PowerPoint, Word, text, Markdown and pictures. Text inside pictures is recognised on the Mac itself.

Piles and how far you trust them

Each source goes into a pile, such as "Sepsis" or "Heart failure lectures". Each pile sits in a confidence folder, which is your judgement of how accurate and useful it is:

<your source folder>/piles/
  highconfidence/      a guideline you rely on
  mediumconfidence/    lectures, reviews
  lowconfidence/       notes to check

There are two ways to add material:

• Drop files into the folder, for example piles/highconfidence/Sepsis/ssc-2021.pdf. Vademecum notices them and reads them in.
• Use Add source in the web app's header. Paste text or drop files, then pick a pile or make a new one. On the phone, the file goes to the cloud copy and reaches the Mac at its next sync.

What happens next

1. Read in. Each file is read and its text and pictures are stored. Foundation shows what is waiting, what is being read, how much of each source has been built, and why anything is not yet done.
2. Learning points. The Mac's assistant turns passages into short learning points. Each point quotes the passage it came from, and the quote is checked against the source.
3. Encyclopedia. Points are compiled into one page per subject: related topics, such as an antifungal's mechanism, spectrum and toxicity, share a page with a section each, and new points are added to the page rather than starting another. Every paragraph names the points and sources it rests on, so you can always see where a statement came from.
4. Questions and cards. Board-style questions and flashcards are written from each page, then checked against the page before they are asked.

Once you turn on Build in the background (on Foundation), the Mac builds whenever it is awake, one batch at a time, and carries on where it left off after sleeping. It uses your assistant's plan, so a large folder is built over days, not minutes. You can pause it at any time.

Next: A day with Vademecum.