Read and Annotate
The Readable format is Linkwarden's reader: the article on its own, without the navigation, sidebars, pop-ups, and ads that came with it. It's also the only format you can mark up, so highlights and notes live here.
Opening the Reader
Open a Link's details and click Readable under Preserved Formats. To land there on every click instead, set "Clicking on Links should" to "Open Readable, if available" in Settings → Preferences → Link Settings.
The reader shows the article's title, the host it came from as a link back to the original, and the date. If the Readable format hasn't been produced yet, you get a note that preservation is still in the queue; if it was turned off when the Link was saved, there's nothing to show.
Adjusting How It Reads
The Aa button at the top left opens the typography controls:
- Font Style: Sans Serif, Serif, Monospace, Cursive, Caveat, or Bentham.
- Font Size, from 12px to 50px.
- Line Height, from 1 to 3.
- Line Width: narrower, narrow, normal, wide, wider, or full.
"Reset to Defaults" puts them back to Sans Serif at 18px, 1.8 line height, and normal width. These settings are saved to your account rather than the browser, so they follow you to your other devices, and they apply to every article you read rather than just this one.
The dark-mode toggle at the top right switches the theme for the page you're on.
Highlighting
Select some text and a small menu appears with four colors: yellow, red, blue, and green. Click one and the passage is marked.
To change a highlight, click it and the same menu opens, with the current color ticked. Pick a different color to recolor it, or use the trash icon to remove it.
Adding a Note
The speech-bubble icon in that menu turns a highlight into a note. Type your comment, click "Save", and it's attached to the highlighted passage.
A note always belongs to a highlight, so highlighting is the way in: there's no free-floating annotation. Click an existing highlight and then the speech-bubble to add or edit its note later.
The Notes and Highlights Panel
The highlighter icon at the top of the reader opens a panel listing everything you've marked on this article, in a colored stripe matching each highlight, with its note underneath and the date you made it. Clicking an entry jumps to that passage in the text. The trash icon on an entry deletes it.
Who Sees Your Annotations
Highlights and notes are private to you. In a shared Collection, each member marks up the same article independently and nobody sees anyone else's marks, including the Collection's owner.
Annotating needs the Admin role on the Collection, or ownership of it. With Viewer or Contributor the reader is fully readable, but selecting text doesn't offer the highlight menu. See Roles.
On the public page of a public Collection, visitors can read the Readable format but can't annotate it, and none of your highlights are shown to them.
Things to Know
- Deleting a Link deletes its annotations, as does deleting the Collection it sits in.
- The Readable format can't be uploaded or edited. Linkwarden derives it from the page, so a page the reader handles poorly is better read in the Webpage format, which keeps the original layout.