Highlight Harvest — A Google Docs add-on that names your highlight colors and pulls every highlight into one summary

Highlight HarvestScreenshot coming when it ships

What it is

Highlight Harvest is a Google Docs add-on for people who read with a marker. You give each highlight color a job, such as Key claim, Evidence, or Follow up, apply it with one click, and then harvest every highlighted passage in the document into a clean summary grouped by color, in reading order. Copy the list out, or insert it at the end of the doc as a Highlights section.

Who it's for

Students working through a reading, editors marking up a draft, researchers and lawyers pulling the quotable lines out of a long document. Anyone who has ever scrolled back through forty pages looking for the yellow bits.

Why I built it

The most-installed highlighter add-on for Docs has code from 2018, a middling rating, recent reviews saying it stopped working, and it asks for permission to see, edit, create and delete all of your Google Docs. That is a lot to hand over for a highlighter. There was room for a small, current one that asks for far less.

How it works

The add-on only ever touches the document it is open in. It cannot see your other files and it never sends the document anywhere. Named highlighters use exactly the same shade every time, which is what makes grouping later work. Harvest reads every highlight in the doc, whoever made it, and it never double-counts its own inserted summary on the next pass. It runs on Google's own Apps Script hosting, so there is no server of mine in the loop. The licence is $9 once, after a 14-day trial, bought through Polar and pasted into the sidebar.