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Reviews for Yawas Web Highlighter

Yawas Web Highlighter by Laurent Denoue

3.5 Stars out of 5
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Review by Kevin
by Kevin, a year ago
I wish I could use a keyboard shortcut to make a highlight but other than that it's perfect for me

Developer response

posted a year ago
You should be able to highlight with the key shortcuts found in the context menu. Select text, right click, Yawas and you'll see the key shortcuts listed there. On Chrome it is Cmd Shift Y (Yellow, etc)
34 reviews
  • by Elvin Aslanov, 12 days ago
    Thanks, please consider updating for 2025.
  • by inarcsjavagarage, 5 months ago
  • by Andre Bell, a year ago
    Thanks for the follow up question. Today I reinstalled Yawas, a day later. Now Yawas works on web pages. Probably one of the other numerous extensions I had installed was an issue. IDK. I disabled a bunch of them before reinstalling Yawas. Anyhow is now a partial win. Works on web pages but not PDFs read by Firefox. Thx x2

    ---
    Firefox 124.0.1 (64-bit) on Windows nothing happens. Neither right clicking the highlighted text nor using the shortcuts. Bummer.

    Developer response

    posted a year ago
    When you right click on selected text, do you not see a context menu with Yawas that you can open and pick a color?
  • by Majsek, a year ago
  • by Rival, a year ago
  • by Firefox user 13404543, 2 years ago
  • by LSAFER MEEMER, 2 years ago
    works! the highlights are saved after refresh and not like the other add-on.

    But, controls are not fast enough. I have to select the text then right-click then choose the Yawas option then choose the color I want.
    If there is a short-cut combination it would be better.

    Nevermind, there is shortcuts! `Ctrl` + `Shift` + `G` for green and `Y` for yellow and `R` for red and `B` for blue.

    Also, there is a problem when there is too many highlights in a single page.

    I was reading some document and highlighting the things I have read and understood and my highlights are over 140 but when I refreshed they got down to 70
  • by Aqordeon, 2 years ago
    cool. but there was an issue if the font is in white (or something gray). the font is hard to read if the background is colored. it would be great if you add feature to change the color too.
  • by piecevcake, 3 years ago
    Easiest highlighter to use because of shortcuts and context. Great that it auto-saves as searchable bookmarks including highlighted text and added comment.
    Would be good to be able to see manual comments on the web page.
    Doesn't highlight PDFs -Dev??
    Haven't figured out how to download the bookmarks to a text file yet, or the "blue" notes feature.

    Developer response

    posted 2 years ago
    Mozilla wasn’t happy with me using a third party library pdfjs for viewing pdf files so I removed support for pdf highlights. But if you install Yawas from the GitHub source then you can enable it.
    https://github.com/ldenoue/yawas

    The highlights are stored now inside your browser bookmarks: so there must be a way for you to export them using the built in browser tool?
  • by Markenson, 3 years ago
  • by Ahmed, 3 years ago
    Works and great idea to sync via bookmarks but could could use more features like:
    --option to instead of date folder structure to just list all in one folder (prefixed with date stamp)
    --option to exclude page title (for easier skimming and review on other devices)
    --organizing them within folders via category
    --"snoozing" to a certain time and using as a flashcard system and overall more highlight management.

    Also it is confusing how this has to do with Google bookmarks.

    Developer response

    posted 2 years ago
    I tried to store all inside a single folder but it was hanging the chrome or Firefox bookmarks UI. That’s why I had to separate them into year and then months.
  • by Firefox user 17258886, 3 years ago
    Does nothing on Firefox version 96 on Ubuntu (2022). Good idea though
  • by Firefox user 13307652, 3 years ago
  • by mrRootLog, 3 years ago
    Doesn't work
  • by thedivclass, 4 years ago
  • by Bout's Morgan, 4 years ago
    Excellente extension. Merci Laurent !

    Developer response

    posted 2 years ago
    Merci!
  • by Firefox user 12643979, 4 years ago
    Using it for the first time and like it so far.Pity you don't propose to change web pages in pdf upstream. If you plan to do it let us know. Thank you. XL
  • by Firefox user 13443820, 4 years ago
    Not work at all
  • by laodan, 5 years ago
    Thanks a lot. I'm a writer and find Yawas is a great tool to store future usable quotes.

    The highlight works fine and Google/bookmarks is great for storage.

    One suggestion would be to customize how the text of the highlights appears in Google/bookmarks :
    -- you are using << as starting point of the first highlight on a given page and close it with >> << ... >> << ... >>
    -- the next highlights follow as indicated
    -- the result is visually confusing.
    I manually edit the text of a bookmark by replacing << with br inside < >
    and >> << with br br < >
    The result is a clean and visually ordered text.

    Would it be possible to tweak Yawas along those lines ?
    __________
    Answer to your response here under.

    I discovered indeed that Yawas does not find the highlights after having edited out the << and >>.

    An empty line between highlights is radically improving readability and I discover that the presence of the markers is useful in the sense that they signal the presence of text on the webpage that was not highlighted in-between these markers.

    Thanks for adding an empty line between highlights.

    Developer response

    posted 5 years ago
    Hello
    By editing out the << and >>, Yawas will not find your highlights well the next time you visit the page. (It depends on these markers to recreate the highlights and comments)
    But we could add newlines between highlights to improve readability.
    Notice that Yawas is open source at https://github.com/ldenoue/yawas

    Thoughts?
  • by PERCE-NEIGE, 5 years ago
    Very good idea, but should be improved. You should replace the text in the context menu by an icon (red pen icon, yellow pen icon, or simply yellow square, a cross for "delete"...), it makes it faster to use, because you don't have to read the description (more instinctive) "Comment" doesn't work. (That's a pity, because I would need to pin comments to highlights). And I would even prefer a way with fewer click to highlight, the highlight tool directly in the context menu, with only one click (and changing the color in the options), it allows to work faster. (I don't have the window with colored round icons, that we can see on the image of your website)

    How does it work for linking highlights to Google bookmarks (it's the best part of the addon)? Because I didn't see any login section.

    Developer response

    posted 5 years ago
    You have keyboard shortcuts to quickly highlight text in the page. I like your idea of using icons though in the context menu.

    Google linking works by adding your highlights in the comment field of google bookmarks. It’s handy because it allows you to have all your data stored inside Google Bookmarks: you can access them from any machine.

    You should be asked by Yawas to login if you’re not when we try to highlight a page. There’s a little Yawas green box on the bottom right corner that you can click on if you’re not logged in.

    Yawas is on Github so your contributions are welcome.

    https://github.com/ldenoue/yawas

    Laurent
  • by abtxu, 5 years ago
  • by OmTatSat, 5 years ago
    Thank you for great addon!
    Also had problem "Didn't work. It said "Yawas cannot store your highlight because you are signed out. Please signin first and then refresh this page" I signed into google, didn't work.. "
    To fix problem i logouted from gmail site in Firefox and logined again. After this, worked fine)

    Developer response

    posted 5 years ago
    Thank you!
  • by JackD, 6 years ago
    Didn't work. It said "Yawas cannot store your highlight because you are signed out. Please signin first and then refresh this page" I signed into google, didn't work.. Signed into FF sync, didn't work. I have no other highlighters installed.
    FF 69, Ubuntu 16.04
    I'll keep it long enough for you to reply just in case it can be made to work. I really hope so.
    EDIT: Tried that, made gmail the 1st tab open, didn't help. Couldn't find the .js script you mentioned.
    Uninstalled.

    Developer response

    posted 6 years ago
    strange. could you try opening gmail in a tab, make sure you're signed in, then open a new tab, navigate somewhere and try to highlight something? Alternatively, open the extensions panel, and look for the script background.js of the Yawas: the console might show some error messages. Thanks.
  • by Peter Lyons Kehl, 6 years ago
    How great. I compared many highlighting/note taking add-ons, and this one wins. Why?

    - It stores the text(s) that you highlighted. Even if the page changes (or disappears) later, your highlights stay.
    - It backs them up (stores them) and shares them with Firefox synchronization across your computers/profiles and devices.

    Would you like to organize the bookmarks (and highlights stored in bookmarks)? Use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-search-plus-2.

    Would you like to print a page with your highlights? Or to export it as a PDF? Don't use standard Firefox printing (or printing to a file). I tested nine most used and highest rated PDF extensions. Out of them, only one saves the page with your highlights. It's slow, but it works: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/fireshot.

    If a website disables right click/text select, use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/absolute-enable-right-click.

    Beware of 4096 characters limit for the total of the title and all the highlights.
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