The reader

For students

Course documents open in Alexandria’s reader, which keeps the layout the educator produced. Its distinguishing feature is that any passage or figure can be questioned directly, without describing it first.

Controls sit in a rail on the right edge:

Control	Function
Back	Returns to where you came from
Chat	Opens the question panel for this document
Contents	Opens the table of contents
Page number	Click to type a page and jump to it
Up / down	Previous and next page
Zoom	In, out, and reset

Trackpad pinch also zooms.

A thesis page open in the Alexandria reader showing body text and a rendered CFL formula, with the control rail down the right edge: back, chat, table of contents, the current page number 24 above the total 66, previous and next page arrows, and zoom in, zoom out and reset zoom — The reader on page 24 of 66. Every control sits in the right-hand rail.

Your position is remembered. Closing and reopening a document returns you to where you stopped reading, unless you arrived through a link that specifies a page.

The table of contents

Contents opens a panel down the left of the reader listing the document’s chapters, each with the page range it covers. A chapter that has sub-sections carries a chevron; expanding it lists them, again with page ranges. Selecting an entry jumps to it.

Alexandria derives this itself rather than reading a contents page the author wrote, so each entry also carries a short summary of what the section covers. That makes the panel useful for locating the right part of a long document when you know the idea you are after but not where it sits.

The Alexandria reader with the Table of Contents panel open on the left, listing Introduction pages 1 to 12, Geometry pages 13 to 14, Literature review pages 15 to 26 expanded to show its sub-sections Computational Fluid Dynamics, RANS and Turbulence Closure Problem, Turbulence Models and the k-omega approach and No-Slip Boundary Condition and Near Wall Treatment, each with its own page range and a one-line summary, while page 24 of the thesis stays readable on the right — The contents panel with one chapter expanded. Each entry carries its page range and a short summary of the section.

Asking about a passage

Select text, or drag a box around a figure, and a menu appears.

Three actions are immediate, each with a keyboard shortcut:

Explain (E): break down the selection
Ask AI (G): ask about it without consulting the document
Ask document (D): ask with the document as the source

A paragraph of a thesis selected in the reader, with the selection menu open showing Explain with the shortcut E, Ask AI with the shortcut G, Ask Document with the shortcut D, and a collapsed More options row — Selecting a passage opens the menu. The three immediate actions carry their keyboard shortcuts.

Under more options:

Simplify: restate in plainer language
Example: produce another example
Perspective: give a different viewpoint
Dispute: challenge the claim
Derivation: derive a formula step by step

The reader selection menu with More options expanded, revealing Simplify (rewrite in simpler language), Example (find another example), Perspective (find another viewpoint), Dispute (challenge this claim) and Derivation (derive this formula step-by-step) below Explain, Ask AI and Ask Document — More options expanded. Each of the five carries a one-line description of what it does.

The answer appears in place. Continue in chat carries it into the full panel with the document still in scope.

Asking about the whole document

The chat control opens a panel scoped to what you are reading. The scope selector offers three levels, each named after the thing it covers rather than labelled generically:

The document you have open, search only in this document
The folder it sits in, search all content in this folder
The course: search all content in this course

Narrow the scope when a term means different things in different weeks. Past conversations are listed in the panel and can be reopened, renamed, or deleted.

The reader with the document chat panel open on the left, headed New Chat and reading Nothing here yet, its message box prompting you to write @ to scope your search, and the scope selector expanded above it showing three options: Master_thesis (search only in this document), Week 3 - Turbulence (search in all content in this folder) and Thermodynamics (search in all content in this course), while page 24 of the thesis stays readable on the right — The document chat panel with the scope selector open. The three levels are named after the document, its folder, and the course.

Following a citation

When an answer cites a source, selecting the citation scrolls to that page and briefly highlights the exact region the answer drew on.

A return to page control appears after jumping, so you can go back to where you were reading.

Notebooks

Jupyter notebooks open cell by cell. Markdown renders with formatting and mathematics; code cells render as code.

Where a course provides a bundle of notebooks, a tree lists them and questions can be scoped to:

All notebooks in this upload: the usual choice
This notebook, this folder, or this course