Lexfolio: support

Lexfolio is a reading workspace for people who work with texts rather than simply read them. It opens two books side by side, looks words up in dictionaries that need no network connection, and keeps every note, alignment, and card on your own device.

Getting books in

Lexfolio reads EPUB and PDF files you already have. Import them from the Library screen — from Files, iCloud Drive, or anywhere your device can reach. There is no store inside the app and no catalogue of ours; your library is whatever you bring to it.

The title Lexfolio shows comes from the file’s own metadata, falling back to its filename. If a book arrives with an unhelpful name, renaming the file before importing is the quickest fix.

Reading two books at once

Open a book in the left pane and a second in the right. Each pane scrolls independently and remembers its own position, so you can leave a grammar beside the passage that raised the question and come back to both exactly where you were.

Linked scrolling ties the two panes together proportionally: moving a tenth of the way through one book moves the other a tenth of the way through its own. It is off by default, and the toggle sits in the reader’s toolbar. If you prefer the panes fully independent, leave it off.

Looking words up

Select a word to look it up. The bundled dictionaries include modern and classical entries, with Ancient Greek and Latin morphology — an inflected form resolves to its dictionary headword instead of leaving you to work backwards to it. All of this works offline. Optional extra packs can be downloaded if you want them.

Scanned pages and OCR

A PDF made from scanned images has no text layer, so selection, search, and lookup have nothing to work with until the page is recognised. Lexfolio runs OCR on the device when you open such a page, and tells you in a banner above the page which state it is in.

If a page reports that recognition failed, the Retry button in that banner re-runs it. Very faint, skewed, or heavily marked scans can defeat recognition entirely; that is a limit of the page, not a fault you can configure away.

Annotations, vocabulary, and research

Highlights and notes anchor to the text rather than to a page number, so they survive re-importing a document. Words you send to the Vocabulary Vault become spaced-repetition cards that can come back to you through Recall Reading, inside the text rather than in a separate app. Passage alignments let you pair a passage in one book with its counterpart in another and keep the pair.

Research projects group this work and can be moved between devices as .lexfolio packages. Those packages carry your research, not the books.

Syncing between devices

On iPhone and iPad you can turn on iCloud synchronisation for your reading and research records, and separately for the book files. It uses your own iCloud account and is off until you enable it. See the privacy notice for the detail.

Optional AI

Two separate, optional things, both off unless you turn them on:

• Grounded assistance works only if you supply your own provider endpoint, model, and API key. It sends your question and only the excerpts you have checked, and shows you what is going where before every request.
• The in-reader chat panel opens ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and copies the selected passage and its bibliography to your clipboard. You paste and send it yourself; Lexfolio does not submit anything on your behalf.

Something wrong?

Write to the address on this page. The most useful report says which device and iOS version you are on, what you were doing, and what happened instead. If it involves a particular book, saying whether it is an EPUB or a PDF — and whether the PDF is scanned or has selectable text — usually narrows it down immediately.