Dialor

Dialor — User Manual

Contents

  1. What Dialor is
  2. How Dialor solves it — the personas
  3. A personal knowledge base, almost as a side-effect
  4. Main features at a glance
  5. Tutorials
    1. Set up your workspace folder
    2. Configure an AI provider
    3. Open a document
    4. First-document onboarding
    5. What "activating AI" means
    6. Navigate within a document
    7. Select, highlight, and comment on a passage
    8. Auto-engage vs picking a Specialist yourself
    9. Using the / menu in the chat box
    10. Tutor section questions
    11. Cross-document parallels (brief)
    12. Crop a figure and ask about it
    13. The annotation pane
    14. Export an annotation thread as a Markdown note
    15. Glossary
    16. Sync annotations into the PDF file
    17. Where your stuff actually lives
  6. Settings reference
  7. Privacy and data
  8. FAQ / Troubleshooting

1. What Dialor is

Dialor is a PDF reader with a built-in cast of AI dialogue partners. You highlight a passage, write a thought, and an AI persona responds — not to summarise the page for you, but to push back, ask you a question, or connect what you just read to something else in your library.

The problem

Most AI tools today optimise for finishing a document — summarise it, extract the bullets, move on. That is fast, but it bypasses the part of reading that actually builds understanding: noticing, doubting, rephrasing, arguing back. Readers who lean on summarisers often end up knowing of what a paper says without really knowing what it says or why it matters.

The premise

Dialor takes the opposite stance. It slows reading down on purpose and turns it into a back-and-forth: a dialectic. The AI is not a shortcut around the text — it is an interlocutor that keeps you engaged with the text.

Benefits

2. How Dialor solves it — the personas

Dialor offers four ways of engaging with a passage. Some are served by a single Specialist; one is served by three with different temperaments.

Clarify — Explainer

When you want a clearer phrasing of a sentence or a quick conceptual unpack. Best for first reads of a difficult passage.

Connect — Cartographer

When you want to relate what you are reading to what you have read elsewhere. The Cartographer scans your workspace and suggests parallel passages in other documents.

Consolidate — Tutor

When you want to test what you remember. The Tutor asks comprehension questions, often section by section.

Challenge — Contradictor, Philosopher, Structural Critic

Three voices, all there to push back:

3. A personal knowledge base, almost as a side-effect

Because every annotation, comment, and AI reply is written to a folder on your disk in plain formats, what you build up over time is not just notes on a single PDF — it is a small, portable library:

4. Main features at a glance

5. Tutorials

5.1 Set up your workspace folder

On first launch, Dialor asks you to pick a folder on your disk. This is where everything lives.

  1. Click the folder prompt.
  2. Choose a folder you can easily find again (for example, ~/Documents/Dialor).
  3. Grant write access when your browser asks.

To change the folder later: Settings → Annotations folder → Change folder…

Your browser may re-ask for permission each time you reopen Dialor. That is a browser security behaviour, not a Dialor setting.

5.2 Configure an AI provider

Open Settings and scroll to the provider list.

  1. Pick a provider (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Ollama, or "OpenAI-compatible").
  2. Paste your API key into that provider's field. The eye icon toggles visibility.
  3. For Ollama or OpenAI-compatible endpoints, also fill in the Base URL and Model name.
  4. Click Save. The active provider gets a badge.

Each provider section includes a "Get a key" link if you do not have one yet.

5.3 Open a document

Click the open-document button in the toolbar and pick a PDF. Dialor creates a subfolder for it inside your workspace, named after the file, and starts indexing it.

5.4 First-document onboarding

The first time you open a particular PDF, Dialor asks two short questions:

These two answers tune the tone of the personas. The Explainer will pitch differently for a beginner than for an expert; the Tutor will ask questions calibrated to what you said you wanted to learn.

You can change them later in Settings → Reading context, or skip them at first open and answer later.

5.5 What "activating AI" means

When you open a document and a provider is configured, Dialor automatically starts converting the PDF into a Markdown copy in the background. This is what lets the personas actually reason about the text rather than guess from filenames.

5.6 Navigate within a document

5.7 Select, highlight, and comment on a passage

  1. Drag-select text in the PDF.
  2. A floating toolbar appears above the selection. Its top row has Highlight and Comment:
    • Highlight saves the passage as a yellow annotation in the side pane.
    • Comment opens a small inline textbox — write your thought and Save.
  3. When AI is active, a second row appears beneath, with engagement-mode buttons: Clarify, Connect, and Challenge ▾.
    • Click Clarify to send the passage straight to the Explainer.
    • Click Connect to send it to the Cartographer.
    • Click Challenge ▾ to reveal the three challenge Specialists — Contradictor, Philosopher, Structural Critic — and pick one.
    • These buttons act on the passage directly; you do not need to write a comment first, though you can use Comment for that purpose beforehand.

To clear a selection without acting on it, press Escape.

5.8 Auto-engage vs picking a Specialist yourself

There are two ways to decide which persona answers you.

Manual — you pick. Either:

Auto-engage — Dialor decides for you. Turn on Settings → Dialectic engagement → Auto-engage personas on highlight. From then on, Dialor looks at the passage and your comment, and routes the message to whichever Specialist best fits the kind of question you are asking.

If you do not turn auto-engage on and do not pick a persona explicitly, follow-up messages in an existing thread stay with the persona who replied first. That keeps multi-turn dialogues coherent.

5.9 Using the / menu in the chat box

The chat box at the bottom of the side pane is for talking with personas about the whole document (no passage selected) or about a specific passage (one selected). To address a particular Specialist directly, use the / menu.

How to open and use the menu

  1. Click into the chat box.
  2. Type / as the first character.
  3. A small menu appears listing every available command.
  4. Use ↑ / ↓ to move between entries.
  5. Press Tab or Enter to pick the highlighted one.
  6. Finish typing your question and press Enter to send.

The commands

CommandWhat it does
/commentSaves a document-level note. No AI reply.
/clarifyAsks the Explainer about the whole document.
/connectAsks the Cartographer about the whole document.
/consolidateAsks the Tutor about the whole document.
/contradictAsks the Contradictor about the whole document.
/philosophizeAsks the Philosopher about the whole document.
/critiqueAsks the Structural Critic about the whole document.

Scoping to a passage

If you have a passage selected in the PDF when you run a slash command, the question is scoped to that passage instead of the whole document. This is the fastest way to say "ask this Specialist about this sentence."

Tip: /comment is useful for parking a thought without spending an AI turn — for example, a question you want to come back to, or a note to your future self.

5.10 Tutor section questions

Once the Markdown copy of a document is ready, you will see small sparkle icons next to each section heading. Click one to have the Tutor generate two or three recall questions about that section. Your answers become part of the running dialogue.

5.11 Cross-document parallels (brief)

When the Cartographer replies, you may see small chips under its reply representing related passages it found in your other documents. Each chip offers three actions:

This is how a library of separate readings starts to become a connected web.

5.12 Crop a figure and ask about it

  1. Click the crop tool in the toolbar.
  2. Drag a box around a figure, table, or diagram.
  3. The crop is saved as an image annotation in the side pane and on disk under figures/.
  4. You can then comment on the figure or ask a persona about it just like a text highlight.

5.13 The annotation pane

The right-hand pane lists every annotation and reply for the current document, grouped by passage.

For exporting a thread as a Markdown note, see 5.14 below.

5.14 Export an annotation thread as a Markdown note

A finished dialogue is more useful when you can drop it into the rest of your note-taking life. Every thread in the annotation pane can be exported as a standalone Markdown file you can read anywhere.

How to export

  1. In the annotation pane, find the thread you want to keep.
  2. Click the export icon on the group header.
  3. Dialor writes the thread to <workspace>/notes/<slug>.md. The slug is derived from the passage so the file is easy to recognise on disk.

What the note contains

Where to use it next

Because the export is plain text, you can also edit it afterwards without affecting the original annotation thread inside Dialor.

5.15 Glossary

Open the Glossary tab in the side panel and click Build Glossary to have the AI extract key terms and definitions from the current document (the button reads Rebuild once one already exists). You can:

The glossary is saved as glossary.json inside the document's subfolder.

5.16 Sync annotations into the PDF file

Highlights and comments live in Dialor's sidecar by default — they will be there next time you open the file in Dialor, but they will not show up if you open the same PDF in Preview, Adobe Reader, or another viewer.

Click the Sync icon in the toolbar (tooltip: "Sync highlights & comments to PDF file") to write your annotations directly into the PDF file. After that, the highlights travel with the PDF wherever it goes.

5.17 Where your stuff actually lives

Inside your workspace folder, every PDF has a subfolder named after it. Inside that subfolder:

my-paper.pdf/
  manifest.json        info about this document
  annotations.jsonl    every highlight, comment, and AI reply, one per line
  source.md            the Markdown copy the personas read from
  glossary.json        the glossary, if you built one
  figures/             cropped images from the crop tool

Exported notes (from the annotation pane) land in <workspace>/notes/.

Outlines and per-section summaries also exist on disk; they feed into the chat in the background rather than appearing in a panel of their own.

There is no in-app file browser — to look through your notes outside of a dialogue, open the workspace folder in your operating system's file explorer.

6. Settings reference

7. Privacy and data

Your documents, annotations, and notes never leave your machine. The only outbound network traffic Dialor makes on your behalf is your chat with the AI provider you chose, using your API key. Dialor's servers proxy those calls so your key is sent over a single trusted path, but they do not store your messages, your documents, or your key. Your key lives in your browser's local storage; clearing browser data clears it.

8. FAQ / Troubleshooting

Dialor will not open in my browser. Dialor needs the File System Access API, which only Chromium-based browsers support. Use Chrome, Edge, Brave, or Arc. Safari and Firefox will not work.

It asks for folder permission every time I open Dialor. This is a browser security behaviour. Re-grant access when prompted; your data is still there.

The personas seem to ignore the actual text of the document. The Markdown conversion has not finished yet (or no provider is configured). Open Settings, confirm a provider key is saved, and give the conversion a minute on large PDFs.

My highlight did not anchor where I expected. Sometimes a passage appears multiple times in a document or the PDF's underlying text is messy. Re-select the passage including a few words of context before and after, then highlight again.

How do I switch AI providers? Open Settings, paste a key into a different provider's section, and save. New messages will use the new provider. Older replies stay attributed to whatever generated them.

Where are my notes? Exported thread notes are in <workspace>/notes/. Per-document files are in <workspace>/<your-pdf>/.

Can I use Dialor on an iPad or in Safari? Not yet — Dialor requires the File System Access API, which neither supports.