Features
Practice with your own text
How to feed the practice surface anything you want, and why it is worth doing.
The /custom/ page lets you paste text and type it. The text stays on your device. It is the most flexible mode in the site, and the most underused.
What it does
Paste up to 200 KB of text. The site chunks it into typable segments at sentence and paragraph boundaries -- never mid-word. Each segment becomes one practice session. You move through them at your own pace, and your progress is saved locally.
Drag a .txt file in, and it does the same thing.
Why it is useful
The built-in word lists are good for benchmarks. Real text is different. Real text has names, technical terms, the same word three times in a row, your own particular grammatical tics. The benchmark word list cannot give you any of that.
Three things custom text does that nothing else does:
It teaches your fingers your own writing. Your name. Your company's name. The phrases you use a hundred times a week. Drill these once and they become automatic.
It makes long-form practice tolerable. A 2,000-word session of word-list typing is exhausting. The same 2,000 words from a book you like is something you can sit through.
It works on any source. A speech you are memorizing. A journal entry. A song lyric. A code review you wrote. The site does not care.
Pin a text as a lesson
After saving, you can pin a custom text. It then appears at the bottom of the /lessons/ page, alongside the built-in curriculum. Useful when you want to chip away at a long text over many sessions.
Tips
Strip page numbers and headers before pasting from a PDF, or the typing surface will treat them as content.
Keep paragraphs together -- the segmenter respects paragraph breaks, so a clean source produces clean segments. Run-on text gets chopped at sentence boundaries, which is fine but makes the breaks less natural.
Avoid em-dashes and smart quotes. The corpus rule for the site applies here too: replace — with --, ' with ', " with ". The typing surface accepts the smart versions but they are harder to type.
What it does not do
It does not phone home. Your text never leaves your browser. The custom-text feature uses local storage, full stop. There is no upload, no sync, no telemetry.
It does not OCR images. PDFs need to have a text layer. If a PDF was scanned but never OCR'd, you will get garbage. Run it through a tool that adds the text layer first.
It does not format your text. What you paste is what you type. If you want bold, italics, or headings rendered with style, the practice surface ignores them. It is a typing tutor, not a word processor.