How to use Inkstract

Sign up for a free account at inkstract.com. You don't need a credit card.

Once you're in, open your Dashboard. You'll see your personal inbound email address — something like yourname@in.inkstract.com. This is the address you'll send documents to.

Your inbound address is also shown on your Settings page if you ever need to copy it again.

Inkstract accepts PDFs sent as email attachments. Any device or app that can export a PDF and email it will work.

Once processing is complete, open any document from your Documents list. You'll see two things: a rendered Markdown view of your notes on the left, and a structured sidebar on the right.

The Markdown view

Your handwriting is transcribed and organised into clean Markdown. Headings, lists, and paragraphs are inferred from the layout of your page. You can download the raw Markdown file from the document page if you want to import it into Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, or any other tool.

Tasks, events, and notes

Inkstract recognises bullet journal notation and pulls out structured items:

• □Open tasks appear as checkboxes
• ✕Completed tasks are shown as checked
• ○Events are extracted to the Events tab
• •Notes appear in the Notes tab
• >Migrated items are tracked separately

These are all shown in the sidebar so you can scan them quickly without reading the full document.

Diagrams and sketches

Non-text content — diagrams, drawings, doodles, flow charts — is extracted and preserved as images. They're embedded inline in your Markdown output at the position they appeared on the page, so the visual context is maintained.

Inkstract automatically names your documents based on what it detects in your handwriting — a date, a heading, or a meeting title if one is present.

You can change the title at any time by clicking the pencil icon next to the document name on the document detail page. The original filename is preserved underneath for reference.

Connect your Todoist account in Settings to have extracted tasks automatically pushed to your Todoist inbox. Connect once and it works on every document you send.

Tasks include due dates if you've written them — phrases like by Friday or next Wednesday are picked up and attached to the task automatically.

You can disconnect the integration at any time from the same Settings page.

Turn on Email me when processing completes in Settings and your processed notes will be delivered straight to your inbox as a formatted email with diagrams inline. A copy of the raw Markdown file is attached.

No need to log into the dashboard — your notes come to you.

Your personal dictionary teaches Inkstract the vocabulary you use — abbreviations, acronyms, project names, people's names, technical jargon. The more entries you add, the more accurate your transcriptions will be.

Adding entries

Go to Dictionary and add any abbreviation or shorthand you use. Each entry has:

• Abbreviation — what you write (e.g. QBR)
• Expansion — what it means (e.g. Quarterly Business Review)
• Description — optional context to help with interpretation

Replace inline vs. context only

Auto-detected abbreviations

When Inkstract encounters a token it doesn't recognise — a short all-caps sequence, an unusual word, something that looks like an abbreviation — it flags it for your review. These appear in your Dictionary under the Review queue. You can confirm them (adding them to your dictionary with an expansion you supply) or dismiss them. Over time this teaches Inkstract your specific vocabulary without any manual work.

Inkstract is built around Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal system. It recognises the following symbols by default:

Customising symbols

If you use a different notation system, or want to add extra symbols, go to Settings → Bullet journal symbols. You can override any default symbol or add new ones using JSON:

{"#": "topic tag", "~": "in progress", "?": "needs follow-up"}

Your custom symbols are merged with the defaults, so you only need to specify the ones you want to change.

Your notes are personal. Inkstract is built with privacy as a constraint, not an afterthought.

• All content — transcriptions, dictionary entries, your Markdown output — is encrypted at rest with a key unique to your account.
• Source PDFs are deleted immediately after processing by default. You can change this in Settings → Source file retention to keep originals for 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or indefinitely. When a source file is still available, you'll see a View Original PDF link on the document page.
• API calls to OCR and AI services are made without your identifying information.
• You can export all your data at any time from Settings → Export.
• You can delete your account and all data permanently from Settings → Delete account.
• You can report abuse or any concerns about how the service is being used here.

For the full details, read the Privacy page.