Research Center

What It Holds

• PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets (Excel/CSV), plain text, images, and audio — previewed right in the app
• Web links, saved with a title, note, and tags
• Filters by universe, book, file type, and tag, plus a search box
• A full-screen preview — double-click a file or use the expand button

Pinning to Your Story

A file can be pinned to as many places as you like — a map pinned to a location and a chapter, a reference photo pinned to a character. Pinned files also appear inside that entity's own panel (in its Research tab), so your references are always a glance away. An image can also be pushed straight into a character, location, or item's picture gallery with Add to a gallery.

You don't have to do all the pinning by hand. When a document lives in a universe, ChapterMuse reads it and automatically attaches it to the characters, locations, factions, items, and glossary terms it mentions — so their “sources” lists fill in on their own. Opening an entity or a glossary term also sweeps your placed documents for it and pulls in any that talk about it. Files sitting in Unassigned are deliberately left alone: nothing is attached automatically until you place them in a universe — the moment you do, the sweep runs and their pins fill in. If auto-attach ever pins something you don't want, just detach it — it won't come back.

Where a File Is Available

A research file can serve more than one place at once — the whole of a universe, a single book, or several of each. The inspector's Available in list shows every home the file has: a universe-level entry means every book in that world can see it; a book entry means just that book. Each entry has its own remove button, so you can withdraw a file from one book while it keeps serving the others. Also use in… adds another home without disturbing the existing ones.

Dragging a file in the binder tree asks when it matters: dropping it somewhere new while it already lives elsewhere offers Move (it ends up only at the target) or Also use (it gains the target as an extra home). Dropping onto Unassigned is the explicit reset — every availability is withdrawn. Availability is also what Muse sees: an unassigned file is invisible to Muse until you place it — putting a file in the binder is the one and only way to share it. Each Muse chat also has a source dial (All · App · Research) to narrow what that conversation may draw from.

Reading, Searching & Highlighting

Every document opens in a reader that works the same whether it's a PDF, a Word file, or a page you clipped. Search finds text as you type — matches are highlighted and you can step through them with the up and down arrows. The scope toggle lets you search just the open document or everything in your Research Center, and it's smart about apostrophes, so typing kor' still finds Kor'tha.

• Your story-world names — characters, locations, factions, and items — are highlighted in every research document, colour-coded by type, just like in your manuscript
• Hover a highlighted name for a quick preview card, and use Open in glossary to jump straight to that entity
• Right-click a passage and choose Highlight to mark exactly that spot — highlights are saved per document and work everywhere, including PDFs (which have no other way to be marked up)
• Right-click a highlight again to remove it; right-click any selection to Copy it, or add it to your story world as a character, location, item, or faction — the same options the document editor offers

Beside Your Manuscript

You don't have to leave the page you're writing to check a source. In the book editor, the Manuscript menu has a Research button that opens a panel to the right of your manuscript — the same place AI Analysis appears. It lists every research file in the book's universe (or pinned to the book) as tiles; click one to read it in full, with the same story-world highlighting, hover cards, in-document search, and right-click highlighting you get in the Research Center. Add a name to your glossary and it lights up in the open document straight away.

Editing & Exporting

• Text documents (Word, plain text, or ones you create in the app) open in a built-in editor — your edits are saved back to the file and travel in your backup
• Export gives you the file in Word (.docx), PDF, or plain text — the format it came in as is preselected
• Exporting in the file’s own format hands back the exact original; other formats are generated from its content, preserving headings, lists, tables, and basic styling
• Spreadsheets, images, audio, and web clips export as-is (a clip opens in your browser instead)

AI Help (optional, uses credits)

• Summarise with AI — turn a long PDF or document into a concise summary, saved in its own box on the file
• Transcribe with AI — turn a voice memo into text, saved in its own box on the file
• You always see the credit cost and confirm before anything runs
• These two file actions send that file’s text or audio to our cloud AI service; Muse separately sends only the passages it reads for the question you asked
• PDFs keep page identity; CSV and .xlsx sheets keep sheet and row identity; supported images use packaged, on-device English OCR. Long, low-confidence, empty, or unsupported files show an explicit coverage warning instead of pretending the whole file was read