Highlighter

Highlight webpages and PDFs, draw in margins, add notes and tags, and download annotated PDFs. Local-first and free.

Highlight webpages and PDFs, jot notes, and draw quick marks in the margins. Highlighter keeps your annotations on your device so you can return to them later. Select text, pick a color, and it stays there the next time you open the page. Add a note, tag it, and find it again later from the side panel. Nothing is uploaded anywhere - your highlights live on your own computer. HOW IT WORKS Turn on highlight mode from the extension popup, then select text to save a highlight in your chosen color. Reopen the page later and Highlighter attempts to restore your highlights, even if surrounding text has changed. Click a highlight to expand it in place, where you can write a note, add tags or change its color. Open the side panel to see every highlight on the page at once, or switch to the library to browse every page you have ever highlighted. PDF HIGHLIGHTING AND DRAWING Chrome's built-in PDF viewer cannot be annotated directly by Highlighter. Use "Open PDF in Highlighter" in the extension popup to open a PDF in the bundled viewer. Highlight selectable text, draw on the page, and download a separate annotated PDF with your highlights and drawings embedded. The original PDF is unchanged. Exported marks are flattened into the copy; notes and tags stay in Highlighter and JSON backups. Scanned PDFs without a text layer support drawing, but text highlighting requires selectable text. If a site blocks loading, use the viewer's file picker to open a downloaded copy of the document instead. FEATURES • Separate light/dark sets of seven editable colors, with a picker, hex codes and shared names • A dedicated PDF viewer with persistent highlights and page-relative drawing • Download an annotated PDF with highlights and drawings embedded in a separate copy • Freehand ink for quickly marking webpage or PDF margins • A hideable page toolbar: restore it from the popup, and it automatically disappears when highlight mode is off without hiding saved annotations • An ON/OFF/DRAW toolbar badge and automatic readable highlight text colors • Notes and tags on any highlight, plus a note about a page as a whole • Right-click any selection to highlight it • A side panel listing every highlight on the current page, with next and previous buttons to step through them • A full-page library: browse by page, tag or color, edit many highlights at once, and a review mode that brings back passages you have forgotten • Search with filters such as #tag, color:yellow, site:example.com and has:note • Filter by color, sort by document order, date or color, and reorder by dragging • Export to Markdown, Obsidian / Logseq Markdown, JSON, CSV or plain text, and copy a formatted citation or Markdown quote • Full backup and restore, so moving to a new machine is not a data loss event • Keyboard shortcuts for highlighting and for opening the panel • Light and dark themes, following your system setting by default • Deep dark presets with at least 7:1 contrast against white text • A minimap showing where highlights sit on a long page • Per-site disabling for pages you would rather it stay out of • Undo for anything you did not mean to do PRIVACY The PDF viewer downloads only the document you explicitly open from its original site. Annotations are never uploaded. There is no account, no analytics, no telemetry and no advertising identifier. Your highlights are stored with chrome.storage.local, which means they stay on your computer - they are not uploaded, not synced to Google's servers, and not visible to anyone but you. If you choose to, you can sync your settings (never your highlights) through your own Chrome sync; it is off unless you turn it on. Site icons in the library are drawn locally as letter avatars instead of being fetched from a favicon service, specifically so that browsing your own library does not reveal the list of sites you read. Because everything is local, uninstalling the extension deletes your highlights. Use Backup in the options page first if you want to keep them. FREE, WITH AN OPTIONAL TIP JAR Every feature is free and nothing is locked behind a payment. There is a small "Buy me a coffee" link in the panel footer if you would like to support the work. It is an ordinary link, nothing is loaded from that site unless you click it, and ignoring it costs you nothing. WHY IT ASKS FOR ACCESS TO ALL SITES Chrome shows a broad "read and change all your data on all websites" warning because there is no narrower way to say "any page the user chooses to highlight on". Highlights can be created anywhere, so the set of sites cannot be known in advance. That access is used only to paint your highlights back onto a page, show annotation state/counts in the toolbar, and download a PDF you explicitly open from its original site. Annotations are never transmitted to the developer or an analytics service.