Google Docs™ can highlight, but a highlight is just a colour. Highlighter gives each colour a name, counts what you marked, and pulls the marked passages out — grouped by category — so colour-coding becomes something you can actually use: for qualitative coding, literature review, editing passes, teaching feedback, or any close reading.

FREE, AND STAYING FREE

• Mark your selection into six named categories — Key point, Evidence, Method, Question, Agree, Disagree.
• Everything you mark is ordinary Google Docs™ highlighting. It stays in your document, collaborators see it without the add-on, and it survives if you uninstall. Nothing is held hostage.
• The panel counts the passages in each category, so you always know what you have.
• Extract passages writes them — grouped by category, in the category's colour — at the end of your document. The section is rebuilt on each press and says so on itself, so it never duplicates.
• Remove highlight takes the marking off exactly what you selected.

Marking, the categories, the counts and the extract are free. We will not move any of it behind payment.

PRO — $29 per year, or $69 once

• Mark every match of a word or phrase at once, across the whole document.
• Your own palette: rename the categories, pick your colours, and they follow you between documents.
• Coverage stats: character counts per category, so you can see how much of the document each code holds.
• One licence, every tool. The same key unlocks Pro in every add-on we publish, including the ones that do not exist yet.

BUILT AROUND WHAT WENT WRONG BEFORE

The tool this replaces was loved and then abandoned, and its reviews say exactly what hurt: a sidebar that "takes way too much screen space", permissions that made people uncomfortable, and marking that stopped working while documents full of colour-coding lost their meaning. So:

• The panel is the native side panel — narrow, and it never blocks typing in the document.
• Your marks are plain Google Docs™ formatting. If this add-on disappeared tomorrow, your documents would keep every highlight and every extract.
• It asks for one permission, and nothing else.

ONE PERMISSION, AND NOTHING LEAVES GOOGLE

Highlighter asks for exactly one permission: access to the document you currently have open. Not your other documents. Not your Drive. Nothing in Gmail, Calendar or your contacts.

It runs entirely inside Google Apps Script™. There is no server of ours, no database, no analytics and no tracking. The licence key for Pro is verified inside your own Google account by checking its signature — there is no licence server. Nothing is transmitted to us, because there is nowhere for it to be transmitted to.

HOW TO USE IT

1. Install, then open any Google Docs™ document.
2. Select a passage and press a category — it is highlighted in that category's colour.
3. Watch the counts build up in the panel as you work through the document.
4. Press Extract passages to get every marked passage, grouped by category, at the end of the document.

Questions, bugs and feature requests: gheorghe.beschea@overheat.agency — a person answers.

Google Docs™ and Google Apps Script™ are trademarks of Google LLC.