Highlighter

Highlighter is an Obsidian plugin for highlighting and margin notes in Markdown, PDF, and EPUB files.

The Obsidian plugin ID is highlighter.

Features

• Highlight Markdown selections with yellow, green, blue, pink, or purple markup.
• Capture highlights from PDF and EPUB selections without modifying the binary file.
• Add margin notes to highlights.
• Browse, edit, jump back to, and delete captured highlights from the Highlights pane.
• Restore PDF/EPUB highlight overlays as virtualized pages are recreated while scrolling.
• Paste Obsidian mobile PDF selection links to capture highlights on iPhone or iPad.

Install manually

Highlighter is not in the Obsidian Community Plugins browser yet, so install it manually from this repository's GitHub release.

1. Open the latest release from the Releases section of this repository.

2. Download these three files from the release assets:

   • main.js
   • manifest.json
   • styles.css

3. In your Obsidian vault, create this plugin folder:

   .obsidian/plugins/highlighter/
   

   The folder name must be highlighter because that is the plugin ID in manifest.json.

4. Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into that folder.

5. Reload Obsidian.

6. Go to Settings → Community plugins and enable Highlighter.

macOS quick install

Replace /path/to/YourVault with your vault path and REPO_OWNER with the GitHub account or organization that owns this repository:

VAULT="/path/to/YourVault"
REPO_OWNER="REPLACE_WITH_REPO_OWNER"
PLUGIN_DIR="$VAULT/.obsidian/plugins/highlighter"

mkdir -p "$PLUGIN_DIR"
curl -L "https://github.com/$REPO_OWNER/highlighter/releases/latest/download/main.js" -o "$PLUGIN_DIR/main.js"
curl -L "https://github.com/$REPO_OWNER/highlighter/releases/latest/download/manifest.json" -o "$PLUGIN_DIR/manifest.json"
curl -L "https://github.com/$REPO_OWNER/highlighter/releases/latest/download/styles.css" -o "$PLUGIN_DIR/styles.css"

Then reload Obsidian and enable Highlighter in Settings → Community plugins.

Update manually

To update, download the three latest release assets again and replace the existing files in .obsidian/plugins/highlighter/, then reload Obsidian.

Migrating from apple-books-highlighter

Older manual installs used this folder:

.obsidian/plugins/apple-books-highlighter/

For version 0.3.5 and newer, install Highlighter in:

.obsidian/plugins/highlighter/

If you already have local highlight data, copy data.json from the old folder to the new highlighter folder before deleting the old folder.

Usage

Markdown

Select text in a Markdown note and use the Highlighter context menu or command palette actions to apply a color or create a note.

PDF and EPUB

Open a PDF or EPUB in Obsidian, select text, and choose a highlight color from the floating Highlighter palette. Highlighter stores the quote, note, color, and jump location in plugin data; it does not write visual markup into the PDF or EPUB file.

For Obsidian mobile PDF selections, copy the PDF selection link and run Paste mobile PDF selection as highlight from the command palette.

Development notes

This repository contains the built plugin files directly:

• main.js
• manifest.json
• styles.css
• versions.json

Do not commit data.json; it contains local vault highlight data.