Looking for a way to "Highlight" Article Text

Community
1

I am busy doing research for a paper.

In the old days, everything was on paper, and so I would use a Highlighter marker to mark important content.

But since almost all of my research is now online, I can’t do that?!

Is there some reasonably easy way to be able to “highlight” text from online sources?

Here is the end-effect that I want…

Now, the sample above is actually a screenshot from highlighted text in an Open-Office Writer document. But what I am wanting is the same looking end-effect, but where I am marking up a web page, if you follow me?!

Sincerely,

Debbie

2

In HTML it really depends what context the highlight is in.

If you are emphasising something you could use the EM tag - http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/em
Citing something there’s always the CITE tag - http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/cite
If you are quoting text then use BLOCKQUOTE or Q tags - http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/q http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/blockquote
If you simply want to highlight without any special emphasis then use the SPAN tag - http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/span

…of course each tag can have it’s own CSS styling!

3

You missed the entire essence of my question…

Debbie

4

Hi Debbie,

Are you averse to using javascript? I know you prefer no javascript in your own site, but this is really a job for javascript and something that has been done. eg. Firefox addons https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/highlighter

5

That depends.

First, please allow me to re-state what I am trying to do…

I am scouring the Internet looking for online material to support the paper that I am writing.

When I find relevant online articles/content, it would be helpful to me, if I could “highlight” certain passages, so that later when I actually start to write my paper, I can go back to all of these Articles that I am saving, and quickly find the parts that I cared about.

All I am trying to do, is mimic what you’d do in the paper world…

  • Read an Article
  • Use a Highlighter marker to mark the stuff you need for your paper
  • Place the paper in a stack
  • Repeat for each Article
  • Review all Highlighted Articles
  • Use that as supporting material for your Paper

Many years ago, I had a copy of Adode Acrobat Professional on my PC, and I could do what I am describing using Acrobat Professional. (I would just find an article online, PDF it, then open the PDF, use the highlighting tool, mark up the passages that I cared about, re-save the PDF, and then I had a permanent copy of the original online article as a PDF with corresponding highlighting. Unfortunately, that was back in my Windows XP days, and I no longer have that PC, and last I checked, Adobe Acrobat Professional was like $600-$800!)

What I am describing has to be an extremely common problem/need among college students…

Back in the old days, we just used Red Pens and Highlighter Markers on paper.

Not sure how I mimic that workflow on my MacBook Pro and on the Internet… :-/

Follow me?!

BTW, I’ll listen to what you have to say about JavaScript, but I can already say that it would be FUTILE if I have to write computer code to highlight a sentence like in the screenshot I provide above!!

Sincerely,

Debbie

6

I was thinking it would be easy enough to write the javascript, but no need, it’s already been done.

From what I can tell by looking on the addons page there are several variations. eg.
Similar to “find”, the script highlights the words on a currently open page (not what you want)
A script saves the selected text on your computer - essentially doing an auto copy/paste for you (probably not what you want)
A script remembers the page URL and the selected words so that when you revisit the page those words are highlighted and scrolls to the area of interest. Not sure if you would need to “bookmark” the pages. Some let you “annotate”.

7

Do either of these articles help?

http://www.ehow.com/how_2252017_highlight-text-pdf-document.html

8

Oops! I didn’t know that OS-X’s Preview had the “highlighting” feature in it?! :blush:

Thank you, I think that solved my problem.

BTW…

1.) Is Adobe Acrobat safe these days? (I thought it had lots of security holes in it?)

2.) Does anyone know what features Adobe Acrobat Professional would have that I cannot already do for free using OS-X Preview or Adobe Acrobat Reader?

(It seems to me that the reason I loved Acrobat Pro back when I was a Windows person, was the fact that it was the only way to create a PDF file of things… )

3.) Are there any open-source tools out there that not only allow you to highlight and PDF things, but maybe do some fancier stuff too?

Sincerely,

Debbie

9

Presumably you know that LibreOffice/OpenOffice will let you export documents as PDFs.

OpenOffice or Inkscape. http://www.labnol.org/software/edit-pdf-files/10870/

10

Right.

Wow, thanks for the link!! :slight_smile:

So, have you used any of the things in that link?

For instance, have you used Inkscape to manipulate a PDF?

Have you used OpenOffice to manipulate a PDF?

Sincerely,

Debbie

11

BTW, I tried this link, and the OO Extension doesn’t work…

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

Here is a screenshot of the error I get…

Debbie

12

Are you using the right extension for your version of OpenOffice? The current version is 4(.something, I think), for which you will need the extension from http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/node/17351

13

Depends on what you want to do. To add your comments (highlight them like you do), it is safe

If you only want to create PDFs, you have plenty of free applications (some have been mentioned here) like PDF Creator.

Now, if you want to modify a PDF (minor changes), add links, add commets, add/edit forms and recollect information automatically with PDF forms, manipulate transitions between pages, etc… you need Acrobat Professional.

For bits and pieces, you can find other applications (like PDF Split and Merge for dividing or joining PDFs) but the software that has it all is Adobe Acrobat.

You may not need the Professional version (which can create forms). Maybe Standard version (no form creation) will be good for you.

For highlighting yes (but then, if comments are open in the PDF, you can use Adobe Reader for that). Regarding the fancy stuff, it depends on what funcy stuff you want to do. I haven’t seen any that did any editing and was free[/COLOR]