Files live in the outline alongside everything else. A PDF, an image, a saved email — each becomes a bullet you can tag, reference, move, and re-find like any other thought.
Drag it in. Drop one or more files anywhere on the page. Drop onto a bullet and a purple guide line shows where it will land — drop on the top of a row to place it above, the bottom to place it below, or the middle to nest it as a child. Drop in the empty space below your outline and it's added at the end of the page. Hold Shift while dropping to force it in as a child.
Use the Attach button. Click Attach (the paperclip, next to "Add a block" at the bottom of the page) to open your system file picker. Select one or more files and they're added as new bullets.
Either way, you can add several files at once. A small toast tracks each upload as it goes.
Every file is encrypted on your device before it's uploaded — the server only ever stores ciphertext, and your original filename never leaves your machine. See Privacy for the details.
For text-bearing files — PDFs, Word and Excel documents, plain-text and Markdown files, and emails — Thoute also pulls out the text so the file is fully searchable. The first part of that text shows inline on the bullet; the rest is indexed behind the scenes and turns up in search and the Library.
Thoute recognizes the file and renders it with the right kind of bullet:
| You drop in… | It becomes |
|---|---|
.pdf |
a PDF, viewable inline |
.jpg .png .gif .webp .svg .heic |
an image, with a preview |
.mp4 .mov .webm .mkv |
a video |
.doc .docx .xls .xlsx .ppt .pptx |
an Office document |
.txt .md .csv .json and other text |
a text document |
.eml |
an email (see below) |
| anything else | a generic file you can download |
Drop an .eml file and Thoute parses it into an email bullet — it reads the subject (used as the title), the sender, the date, and the body, and renders them in a clean reader with the original formatting. Any files that were attached inside the email are listed too.
A note on dragging from your email app. You can drag a .eml file straight from your desktop or a Finder/Explorer window into Thoute and it works. Dragging a message directly out of your email client often doesn't — most desktop email apps (Apple Mail, Outlook, and others) hand the browser a proprietary reference instead of a real file, so the drop is rejected.
The reliable path is to get the message onto disk as a .eml first:
.eml/.emlx), then drag that file into Thoute..eml / Outlook Message format, then drag the saved file in..eml, then drag it in or use Attach.Once it's a file on disk, drag it in or pick it with Attach like any other attachment.
A file is a bullet, so it can carry tags — but since there's no text to type a #tag into, you add them from the file's detail panel. Click the file to open the panel on the right, then add tags in the Tags row (existing tags autocomplete; remove one with its ×).
If the tag is a live tag, applying it here fills its fields and sections in as child bullets beneath the file — exactly like tagging any other bullet. Tagged files also turn up in Explore → Tags alongside everything else.