Save the highlight, not just the colour
Select text, right click, and the quote is yours with a link back to where it came from.
What you get: The selected text, a link to the page, and the page title as the link label. Nothing else is added and nothing is uploaded.
Why a highlight disappears and a note does not
A web highlighter stores a position on someone else’s page: this paragraph, these characters. When the site is edited, redesigned or paywalled, the position stops matching and the highlight is gone or lands on the wrong text.
Here the words themselves are copied into a note on your machine. The page can change or vanish; your quote does not. That is the difference between marking a page and keeping what it said.
You still get the way back. The note carries a link signed with the page title, so a week later you know the source without keeping the tab open.
What lands in the note
- The selected text: as text, with line breaks kept. Markup from the page is not carried over.
- A link to the page: the real address, checked before it is saved.
- The page title as the label: unless the title looks like an address itself, in which case the host is used. A page can name itself anything, and a link whose label disagrees with its target is a phishing pattern.
- Nothing else: no images, no favicon, no tracking of what you saved.
When a highlighter is the better tool
- You want the marks visible on the page itself, every time you return to it. That is what a chrome highlighter does and this does not, so a highlighter chrome extension is the right tool there.
- You need to annotate web page content in place, colour-coding a long document rather than collecting quotes to reuse.
- You need to share the marked page with someone else. Notes here are local and personal.
The honest limits
- The quote is trimmed if it is longer than your plan allows: 5,000 characters on Free, 100,000 on Pro. The source line is always kept.
- On pages that are not http or https, such as a local file, there is no link to save, so only the text is kept.
- This is an annotation tool for your own reading. Nothing is published, shared or synced unless you turn on Pro sync into your own Google Drive.
Related
- Quick notes: how capture works when you have two seconds.