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I would like to add annotations (such as underlines, text comment, circle or square a text region, ...) to downloaded html files. Is there some WYSIWYG html annotation tool (for Linux) for that purpose?

Not sure if browsers can. Chrome web browser seems not able to? Not sure about Firefox.

Not sure if non-browsers can.

Thanks.

Tim
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4 Answers4

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That depends on what you want to do with the result.

If the document needs to stay in HTML format, you would need to use a general HTML editor, I do not think there are HTML editors specialized to annotations.

In case a solution that does not output HTML can solve your problem,
you could import the HTML to a word processor, like Libreoffice Writer, and annotate that document.

Volker Siegel
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Another solution is to use https://hypothes.is/ (the annotations made will not be part of the HTML document that you are annotating, but will be stored on the cloud).

a3nm
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I have recently described a workflow for saving and annotating web pages as HTML files on the forum of Zotero (a tool for source management, for which this question is very relevant):

I have used a ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) editor, which Wikipedia describes as “a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product”. Such an editor can be used to highlight text of interest, and to add notes directly in the text as well. For me, BlueGriffon (http://bluegriffon.org/) works.

One can add extra value by saving the edited file as a separate version. Highlights and notes can then be extracted by computationally checking differences compared to the original.

A very recent improvement of the answer:

After some more searching and testing, I found that the Firefox annotation add-on TextMarker allows for easier highlighting than BlueGriffon. Conveniently, highlighted regions can then be found (and potentially extracted) in the HTML code by searching for "textmarker-highlight".

TextMarker cannot remove highlights from local files, however, and saving notes in local files looks quite messy. So it is probably best to use it in combination with a WYSIWYG editor.

DriesB
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I recently created this utility for adding comments to local html files. I use it to comment on study summaries that my students create from rmd files. I have tested it in Chrome.

The instructions how to use this tool are at the top of that page: In short, drag your local html file into the drop area. It will load your page with buttons for adding comments and for saving the file with your comments.

YBA
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    Please include how to use it in your answer (what you need to do to use it, what options it supports, etc.) – muru Dec 13 '23 at 13:14
  • Ah I see now. This isn't some utility as in some command that we can actually run locally. It's another webapp. – muru Dec 14 '23 at 18:02