LINATL lightsurface
lightsurface takes in your files, reads the text of every one of them, and lets you find anything in them, file them, and build new documents from them. Your documents stay ordinary files on your own device, in folders you can open without the app.
What it does
- Intake. Point it at a folder and it takes in the documents it can read: PDF, Word, OpenDocument, RTF, PowerPoint, Excel and CSV, plain text and Markdown, ebooks, email archives, and images of text. Each document gets a permanent identity that survives renaming and moving.
- Text from scans. Scanned pages and photographed text are run through OCR so they become searchable. The original is kept alongside the searchable copy.
- Search. Find documents by keyword, by meaning, or by field (a date, a party, an amount). Results are highlighted on the original page, and you can copy or clip straight from it.
- Collections. File documents into collections nested as deep as you like, named in any language.
- Languages. Scanned pages are read in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch, with the language detected from each document, and the software can download support for many more. On a Mac, Apple's own text recognition reads further languages. The software's interface is in English.
- Sort. Let the app propose where unfiled documents belong, or group them by likeness, using the included cloud sorting, your own AI key, or a model running on your own machine.
- Create and outline. Gather passages, pages and documents into a project, arrange them in an outline, and compile a new document from them.
- Export. Export documents and compiled work in standard formats.
- Removed files go to a recoverable trash, and a document's earlier versions are kept.
Price
Every plan includes every feature, updates, email support and the included cloud sorting. Annual costs ten months' money for twelve.
| plan | devices | price |
|---|---|---|
| single, monthly | 1 | US$19.90 |
| single, annual | 1 | US$199 |
| household, monthly | 3 | US$24.90 |
| household, annual | 3 | US$249 |
Subscriptions open at launch.
Need licences for a business having more devices under one account, or with more built in cloud compute? Email sales@linatl.com for pricing.
Every plan runs on macOS and Windows: your devices can be Macs, Windows PCs or a mix of both.
Prices exclude sales tax, which is added at checkout where it applies. Prices in other currencies are shown at checkout.
Sold by our reseller Paddle.com, which handles payment, tax and invoices. You can cancel at any time; see the refund policy.
Try it free
7 days or 100 documents, whichever comes first. No payment card needed. Subject to availability, the trial gives you a couple of runs on cloud sorting.
Included cloud sorting
Each subscription includes up to US$4 a month of AI compute for sorting, at the provider's price at the time of use. As an estimate at current Anthropic prices, that sorts about 4,000 documents a month in English or another Latin-script language, or groups about 10,000 of them by likeness. Other scripts use about twice as much per document. What the allowance buys moves with the provider's prices, which the provider sets. It resets each month and does not carry over. When it runs out, you can carry on with your own AI key or a model on your own machine.
Cloud sorting sends the text of the documents being sorted to the AI provider. See the privacy notice.
Permanent licence
Subscribe for twelve continuous months and the version current at the start of that year is yours to keep, on your plan's devices, even if you later stop subscribing. See the licence.
What you need
A Mac with Apple Silicon running macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, or a PC running Windows 10 or 11. The software does not run on Intel-based Macs. At least 4 CPU cores, 8 GB of memory and 10 GB of free storage; no graphics card needed. Search by meaning uses an AI model built into the software, which runs on that minimum. For running AI models on your own machine instead of in the cloud, we recommend an NVIDIA graphics card with 8 GB of video memory, or an Apple Silicon Mac with 16 GB of memory. Smaller models can run on less, including on the processor alone, but may be too slow for your needs.