Highlights and notes

You can mark passages of a paper in one of seven colours, attach a note to each mark, and keep one longer note for the whole paper. All of it is private. Signed out it lives in this browser; signed in it is stored with your account and follows you to other browsers.

Highlight a passage#

The swatches are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, in that order; yellow is the default. The last colour you chose is remembered in this browser and preselected next time. A highlight stores the selected text and the positions of the marked lines relative to the page, so it stays in place at any zoom level.

Change or remove a highlight#

Click an existing highlight in the paper. A card shows its note, if it has one, and offers the seven swatches to recolour it in place, Edit note (which opens the highlight in My notes), Copy text, and Remove highlight, which deletes it together with its note.

The My notes tab#

The top of the tab is the Private paper note, one free-text field for the whole paper. Below it sit the save status line, the Export notes & highlights button (see Export) and the highlight list, ordered by page and then by position on the page and headed N highlights · private. Tick With notes only to hide highlights without a note. Clicking a card’s text scrolls the paper to its page. Hovering a card reveals a pencil, Add note or Edit note, and a bin, Delete highlight. The note editor opens inline: Save or ⌘↵ keeps the change, Cancel or Esc drops it.

Where your notes are kept#

The two stores are not merged. Signed out, the tab says Guest notes stay on this browser. Export a copy before signing in; guest notes are never uploaded automatically. There is no import either, so the export is a copy to keep, not a way to move notes into an account.

The save status line#

Every change to the paper note, a highlight or its note is written half a second after you stop typing. If a write fails it is retried three seconds later, and a save is also attempted when you switch to another tab or window.

Closing the tab or navigating away while a change is unsaved triggers the browser’s leave-page prompt. Following a link inside the app asks first: Your notes have not finished saving. Stay on this paper to save or export them. Leave anyway? Links that open in a new tab, and clicks with a modifier key held, are not intercepted.

Conflicts between sessions#

Signed in, every save carries the revision it was based on. If the same paper was changed from another browser or tab in the meantime, the save is refused and the status line reads Your notes changed in another session. Export your draft, then reload before editing. From then on this tab stops saving, so nothing overwrites the other session’s work. The same happens when your sign-in has expired.

Limits per paper#