Formatted Highlighting
Standard highlighting captures the text you select, but it strips away the original formatting. Formatted highlighting changes that — it preserves headings, paragraphs, bullet points, code blocks, and more, so your highlights look exactly like the content you marked.
🚀 Ultimate Feature
This feature is available in our Ultimate plan. You can try it free for 7 days. Upgrade to Ultimate anytime from the pricing page within the app.
Standard vs Advanced Mode
Web Highlights offers two highlighter modes. You can switch between them in Settings → Highlighter Mode:
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Standard | Every highlight is saved as a simple colored quote. Quick and easy — great if you just need to mark things. |
| Advanced | Highlights keep their original format (heading, list, code, etc.). Best for structured research where formatting matters. |
Supported Formats
When using Advanced mode, Web Highlights detects the type of element you highlight and preserves it:
| Format | Example use case |
|---|---|
| Heading 1 | Article titles and main headings |
| Heading 2 | Section headings |
| Heading 3 | Sub-section headings |
| Paragraph | Regular body text |
| List item | Bullet points and numbered items |
| Code | Inline code and code blocks from technical articles |
| Quote | Default — used for standard highlights and fallback |
The format is displayed in the sidebar and carries over to your exports (Markdown, Notion, HTML, PDF).
How to Enable Formatted Highlighting
- Open the sidebar (click the extension icon or press
Alt + W/Option + W). - Go to Settings.
- Under Highlighter Mode, select Advanced.
Once enabled, every new highlight will preserve its original structure.
Keyboard shortcut 💡
You can also use Alt + A (Windows) or Option + A (Mac) to highlight text with the same format as your last highlight — handy when you're marking multiple headings or list items in a row. See Keyboard shortcuts for all available shortcuts.
How It Looks in the Sidebar
When you highlight a heading, it appears as a heading in the sidebar. List items show as bullets, code appears in a monospace font, and so on. This makes it much easier to scan your highlights and understand the structure at a glance — especially on long articles with lots of sections.
Formatted Exports
The format carries through to every export path:
- Markdown — headings become
#,##,###; list items use-; code gets backtick fences. - Notion — each highlight is created with the matching Notion block type (heading, bulleted list, code block, etc.).
- HTML / PDF — the original HTML tags (
<h1>,<ul>,<code>, etc.) are preserved.
This means you can highlight a structured article and paste it into Notion or Obsidian with the formatting intact — no manual cleanup needed.
Further reading
- Multiple Color Highlighting — customize your highlight palette.
- Highlight Images — save images alongside your text highlights.
- Keyboard Shortcuts — speed up your workflow.
You can also read the original deep-dive on this feature in our blog post: