Perusehdot

Perusehdot is a term used in digital reading and document-annotation contexts to describe a compact marker that records which portions of a text a reader has perused. The concept combines the idea of careful reading (peruse) with a small, discrete marker (dot) to indicate a specific range within a document rather than a broad highlight or bookmark.

Concept and purpose

Perusehdot aims to enable precise tracking of reading progress and engagement at the level of passages, sentences, or defined spans. It supports individual study workflows, collaborative review, and reading analytics by providing a standardized way to mark which parts have been read, reviewed, or require follow-up. By focusing on fine-grained units, perusehdot helps users and tools distinguish between areas that were skimmed and those that were studied in depth.

Data model and semantics

A perusehdot element is typically represented as a small data object attached to a document. Common fields include an identifier, a start position and end position (or a range), a state (for example unread, read, reviewed, flagged), a timestamp, and an optional user or author reference. Additional metadata may include notes, tags, or provenance information. Implementations are designed to be interoperable with formats such as HTML, EPUB, or sidecar metadata files, and can be serialized in JSON or similar lightweight schemas.

Usage and availability

Perusehdot is described as a lightweight, platform-agnostic approach suitable for e-readers, document editors, and collaborative annotation systems. It is envisioned as a complement to existing highlights or bookmarks, providing finer-grained visibility into reading progress while supporting privacy controls and synchronization across devices.

See also

Reading progress indicators, annotations, bookmarks, document markup, reading analytics.