Highlighting Pen in Mozilla

May 25, 2005 7:19 PM

Is there some sort of extension or plugin for Mozilla which lets me highlight something semi-permanently?

I know, I can just use the cursor and highlight some text, but if I accidentally click somewhere-else on the page, it deselects the high-light, if that makes sense.

I'd like something that would just keep the text highlighted until I un-highlight it. Something a little more sophisticated than the "find" feature in Mozilla would be good, since I'd want to highlight several un-adjacent words.

posted by nakedsushi to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

It's hard to say - what do you want to do with it once it's highlighted? I can't think of anything that does this just to do this--as its primary feature, i mean. Maybe as a piece of a larger extension. Like for instance, the googlebar can highlight your search terms, so type the word you want highlighted into the search bar, click the "highlight" button, and there it is.

But it sounds like you want something more free-form than that? Sort of a "highlighter" extension?
posted by misterbrandt at 7:51 PM on May 25, 2005

possibly greasemonkey + platypus?
posted by mecran01 at 7:57 PM on May 25, 2005

Best answer: I swear i saw something that lets you basically write or draw all over web pages, privately of course. I don't think it's what I saw, but this greasemonkey script might do the trick.
posted by 31d1 at 8:00 PM on May 25, 2005

sushi, apologies for my idiotic "highlighter" echo. I arrived here via a feed reader and sort of glossed over your main page title...
posted by misterbrandt at 8:35 PM on May 25, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks a lot everyone. The webnotes GM greasemonkey script suggested by 31d1 is closest to what I'm looking for. I just wanted a simple highlighter, but that script does more than what I asked for, which is good too.

Basically, at work, I have to switch a lot between tabs and verify data in long forms and lists and I wanted a way to quickly highlight where I left off in a tab.
posted by nakedsushi at 9:12 PM on May 25, 2005

nakedsushi writes "Basically, at work, I have to switch a lot between tabs and verify data in long forms and lists and I wanted a way to quickly highlight where I left off in a tab."

If you're doing this, you should really consider writing a greasemonkey script to do it for you; a script will be faster and less error-probe than doing it yourself.

Greasemonkey scripts are surprisingly easy to write.
posted by orthogonality at 10:22 PM on May 25, 2005

Best answer: The Context Highlight extension is exactly what you're looking for.
posted by rafter at 11:11 PM on May 25, 2005

Response by poster: Ooh that's what I was looking for too. Thanks Rafter!
posted by nakedsushi at 11:28 PM on May 25, 2005

Is anyone else trying the Context Highlight extension? It seems like a great idea, but for me the highlighting for the first word/phrase disappears upon highlighting the second word/phrase on the same page, which of course negates all usefulness. Maybe because I'm using 1.0.4?

Am I overlooking something? (closed firefox, plus rebooted after installing).
posted by taz at 12:13 AM on May 26, 2005

Response by poster: Same thing happens to me. I believe it's a feature and not a bug?
posted by nakedsushi at 7:56 AM on May 26, 2005

nakedsushi: I am back in an attempt to redeem myself :) How about the TextMarker extension?

"With this extension you can highlight important text on web pages. Useful when you have several pages open on multiple tags, while doing online research for instance, so that you can come back to a page and know exactly which parts were important."

posted by misterbrandt at 8:27 AM on May 27, 2005