What do all the icons mean? For students

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This guide provides a breakdown of the icons and tools available within the Perusall viewer, helping you navigate your assignments, collaborate with peers, and customize your reading experience.

Top Panel

The tools located at the top of your reading panel allow you to interact directly with the document through highlighting, navigating, and customizing your view.

Icon

Description

Text highlight

text highlight.png
Select this tool to highlight specific text. Once highlighted, a comment box will appear for you topost a note or ask a question.

Figure highlight

Use this to comment on an image or area. Click to drop a pin on a specific spot, or click and drag to draw a box around a section of a figure.

Zoom

Use this dropdown to enlarge or shrink the document text and images, allowing you to customize the view for a more comfortable viewing experience.

Page navigation

Quickly jump to a specific part of the document by typing a page number into this box and pressing Enter.

Rotate

Use these arrows to turn the document 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise. This is especially helpful for viewing landscape-oriented charts, maps, or scanned pages that appear sideways

Comments filter

Use this to clean up your view. You can choose to see all comments, only your own, or hide highlights entirely for a "clean" reading experience.

Copy to clipboard

Copies your currently selected text so you can easily paste it into a comment, a private note, or an external document.

Wolfram|Alpha

Select a mathematical expression or technical term and click this icon to get instant computational data and facts from the Wolfram|Alpha engine.

Print

If enabled use this icon to generate a printer-friendly version of the document. To learn more about what you can print, see here

Download document

If enabled use this icon to generate a PDF version of the document. To learn more about what you can print, see here

Download embedded comments

Export the document with all highlights and comments visible. This is great for keeping a record of the class discussion or using it as a study guide.

Right Panel

Use the icons on the right navigation panel to access social features, track your personal notes, and manage your overall progress.

Icon

Description

Assignment information

Select Assignment Information to see the assignment submission deadline, instructions, and navigate through multi-part assignments.

Current conversation

When you click on a highlight, or comment, the content will be displayed in the Current Conversation.

All conversations

Select All Conversations to browse the full list of students' comments and questions.

Starred

Select My Starred Comments to browse a list of students' comments and questions that you have starred for later review.

Page thumbnail

Page Thumbnails provides a page-at-a-glance view for a given resource, allowing for a quick view of the entire document.

Table of contents

Select Table of Contents to navigate the document via the table of contents. In some instances the Table of Contents may not be available.

Search

Select Search to search the contents of the entire book.

Dictionary

Select a word in the document to look it up in the Dictionary.

Generate citation

Generate a Citation for the document

Bookmarks

Select Bookmark to save the location you are reading in.

Notes

In the Notes panel, you can take notes that are private to you (or you can share them with other course members). Type text, or highlight text or pictures to copy in, with links back to the document.

Read aloud

 In the Read-aloud panel, you can scroll the text to anywhere in the document, and then click the start button to start reading aloud. Click the Start thread button while text is being read to start a conversation based on text you just heard.

View group members

Select the group icon to displays a list of the specific students in your discussion group. 

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