Lumina: Web & PDF Highlighter with Notes

Tracking since May 10, 2026.

Changelog

• May 15, 2026
  description

  Lumina is a clean, fast text highlighter for the web. Select any text, pick a color, and your highlight is saved instantly — stored locally in your browser, never sent to any server.
  
  FEATURES
  
  • 5 highlight colors — yellow, green, blue, pink, orange
  • Annotations — add notes to any highlight with markdown support (bold, italic, code)
  • Auto-restore — highlights reappear when you revisit a page
  • Sidebar panel — browse, search, and filter all highlights for the current page
  • Annotation button — highlight and annotate in one click, remembers your last color
  • Dark mode — follows your system preference or toggle manually
  • Privacy-first — zero data collection, no accounts, no cloud sync
  
  HOW TO USE
  
  1. Select text on any web page
  2. Pick a color from the popup that appears
  3. Click the pencil icon to highlight + add a note in one step
  4. Click any existing highlight to change its color, delete it, or edit the note
  5. Click the Lumina icon in the toolbar to open the sidebar with all highlights
  
  KEYBOARD SUPPORT
  
  • Escape to dismiss the color picker or close the annotation editor
  • Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on Mac) to save and close the annotation editor
  
  PRIVACY
  
  All data is stored locally in IndexedDB inside your browser. Nothing is transmitted to any server. No analytics, no tracking, no accounts. Your highlights are yours alone.

  Lumina is a local-first highlighter and note-taking extension for web pages and PDFs. Select text, pick a color, and attach a note. Everything stays on your device in IndexedDB. No account, no cloud, no tracking.
  
  WHY LUMINA
  • Works the same on web pages and PDFs — one tool for the whole web.
  • Five highlight colors plus a screen-reader-friendly colour label on every highlight (the <mark> element carries an aria-label like "Highlighted in yellow: <excerpt>"), so colourblind and AT users get the colour dimension even when the visual overlay alone isn't enough.
  • Markdown notes on every highlight (bold, italic, inline code).
  • Side panel with search, export, import, and one-click clear.
  • Keyboard shortcuts for power users.
  • 100% local storage. Your highlights never leave your browser.
  
  WEB PAGE HIGHLIGHTING
  • Highlight any selection on any site with five colors: yellow, green, blue, pink, orange.
  • Hover a highlight to see its note in a tooltip.
  • Click a highlight to change color, edit the note, or delete it.
  • Robust anchoring: highlights survive page re-renders, SPA navigation, and lazy-loaded content thanks to a three-part anchor chain (text position, text quote with ±32-character context, and a CSS-selector fallback).
  • Built for modern JavaScript apps — a mutation observer re-restores highlights when new content appears.
  
  PDF HIGHLIGHTING
  • PDFs open in a bundled Lumina viewer (PDF.js). No external requests for viewer code.
  • Select text inside any PDF and highlight it with the same five-color palette.
  • Highlights are anchored to the page offset and a text-quote fallback, so they reappear when you reopen the document. Anchors Lumina cannot resolve are surfaced as "orphaned" rather than silently dropped.
  • Side panel shows a "Page N" badge on every PDF entry and a jump-to-page action that reopens the PDF scrolled to the highlight.
  • Works on https://, http://, and file:// PDFs (local PDFs require the per-extension "Allow access to file URLs" toggle in chrome://extensions).
  
  NOTES AND ANNOTATIONS
  • Attach a markdown note to any highlight.
  • Inline formatting: **bold**, *italic*, `code`. Unpaired markers render as literal characters so prose like "5 * 3 = 15" is preserved.
  • Edit or delete notes from the in-page editor or the side panel.
  
  SIDE PANEL
  • Two views, one toggle: "This page" lists highlights on your current tab; "All" groups every highlight you've ever made by document, sorted by most recently visited, so you can revisit a passage you saved weeks ago without remembering which tab you were on.
  • Full-text search across quotes, notes, and document titles.
  • Export your library as JSON, import from a backup, or clear everything with a guarded confirmation. Imports offer Replace or Merge modes.
  • Click any entry to scroll the page to that highlight. PDF entries scroll the bundled viewer to the page first; a brief "Loading page…" toast appears if the render takes more than a second.
  • Theme (system / light / dark) and view mode are persisted across sessions.
  
  KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
  • Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + H — highlight the current selection with your last-used color.
  • Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + L — open the Lumina side panel.
  • If another extension has claimed these combos, rebind them at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
  
  PRIVACY
  Lumina runs entirely on your device. Highlights, notes, color choices, and settings are stored in IndexedDB (and a single `lumina:theme` key in chrome.storage.local) and never leave your browser. There are no analytics, telemetry pings, login screens, or third-party APIs. You can export your data any time and delete it any time.
  
  PERMISSIONS EXPLAINED
  • activeTab, tabs — to inject the highlighter into the page you are reading.
  • storage — to remember your last-used color and theme across sessions.
  • sidePanel — to show the highlights side panel.
  • webNavigation, declarativeNetRequest — to route PDF navigations through the Lumina viewer so highlighting works on PDFs.
  • host_permissions <all_urls> — so highlighting works on every site you visit. Lumina makes no network requests of its own.

• May 15, 2026
  short_description

  Highlight text on web pages, add notes, stored locally

  Highlight text on any web page or PDF, attach notes, and keep everything stored locally. No account, no cloud.

• May 15, 2026
  name

  Lumina

  Lumina: Web & PDF Highlighter with Notes

• May 15, 2026
  host_permissions

  (empty)

  <all_urls>

• May 15, 2026
  permissions

  activeTab, storage, sidePanel, tabs

  activeTab, storage, tabs, webNavigation, sidePanel, declarativeNetRequest

Permissions & access

Permissions

activeTabstoragetabswebNavigationsidePaneldeclarativeNetRequest

Host access

<all_urls>

Screenshots