Article w/ highlights in reading App => save to EN w/ highlights!?

[Oazinguito 1]

After trying Evernote briefly in 2010 and abandoning it pretty quickly, I recently gave it another shot - and went Premium in under a month

 

However, there is a major gap in my new reading-/workflow which I haven't been able to resolve: On my mobile, I read and highlight articles in an external app (Instapaper in my case), because reading in Evernote itself has several disadvantages (accidentally deleting text etc.). My problem is that I cannot save entire articles with passages highlighted to EN. When I send the Article to EN, highlights within the article are not retained. With EN Clearly, this works beautifully. So my question is: Is there a reading app which allows me to read and highlight on my mobile, then save the article to EN while retaining the highlights? Is there a good workaround? (I am aware that you can send and save just the highlights as clippings to EN, but highlights without context don't help me very much).

 

Cheers!

 

(My apologies if this has been answered before (I could not find anything on the forum, just articles dealing with saving the highlights as such), in this case I'd appreciate a pointer.)

[chirmer 567]

I use Instapaper as well, and what I do is have Instapaper send all ♥ articles to Evernote in their entirety, and then I have an IFTTT recipe set up that appends all Instapaper Highlights to the same note. So while highlights aren't technically highlighted, they are in a running list at the bottom of my article. It's not quite the same but it at least gets the article and its highlights into the same note. I don't know of any way to actually have Evernote visually highlight inside the article, unfortunately, because the Instapaper and Evernote highlight functions are fundamentally different beasts.

 

[Oazinguito 1]

Thank you very much, chirmer - appreciate your advice & great illustration! Guess I will need to start with IFTTT, then - until EN either includes a reading mode (I don't understand why they haven't) or buys and integrates Instapaper or a similar App...

 

Cheers!

[jefito 5,598]

Sounds like you have a couple of feature requests here. If you want to make a feature request for the web clipper, I'd suggest that you post it down in the Web Clipper subforum. Evernote employee jbignert is pretty responsive down there.

[chirmer 567]

IFTTT is super great, I highly recommend it And you could always use Presentation mode for reading - it works especially well on mobile because you can go straight from one note to the next, and tapping inside it doesn't trigger editing the note. You have to leave Presentation mode to add tags, move to a Read notebook, etc. though.

[Oazinguito 1]

@jefito: on my desktop setup, all's fine: I find an article, clip it via Clearly, read+highlight it, then save and archive the highlighted article in EN. My problem is that there is/seems to be no similar solution for smartphones (i.e. read and highlight in a reading app, then save highlighted article to EN), and I do most of my reading on the go. A satisfying solution by EN would be either a) full integration of a reading app with EN or a reading mode in Evernote which allows highlights (will check if this has been requested; after searching the forum, I believe it has, but has not been adressed/implemented yet).

 

@chirmer: you're right, Presentation mode IS quite nice for reading (but doesn't allow highlighting)... But I'm onto sth with IFTTT now: a recipe which translates the highlights within an Instapaper article into bold text in the corresponding EN note. That would be good enough for me... I guess that might be possible via HTML formatting (https://ifttt.com/recipes/102985-if-i-save-an-rss-post-in-feedly-then-create-a-nicely-formatted-note-in-evernote) -  maybe I can get such a recipe set up (haven't found one - I have zero skills in HTML, but I'll give it a shot... )

[Transcient 0]

I know I'm 3 1/2 years late to this party, but had been searching for a solution to this issue and found something that works. I'm highlighting web articles using Liner. When I use the EN web clipper to clip the page that contains the liner highlights, they are moved to EN and include the highlights.

Note that using Liner's built-in export function only sends the highlights to EN.

**edit with more info**

Also discovered that if you use the "Memo" function in Liner (which attaches a note to a highlight), then it stops the highlight making it over to EN when using the above technique. 

Edited February 22, 2018 by Transcient
Add a bit more info on the technique

[claynichols2015 3]

On 9/8/2014 at 9:34 AM, chirmer said:

have an IFTTT recipe set up that appends all Instapaper Highlights to the same note.

Great solution! 

 

1. Is this the IFTT recipe?
2. Is the "save Favorited Instapaper article" and  "save highlights" in the SAME recipe?
3. Is there any way to move the highlights to the beginning (i.e., Prepend them)?

[CraigZ 21]

A different approach might be to print your articles to PDF after highlighting and using Evernote import folders to import into Evernote.  Perhaps IFFT can automate the printing when you've read and highlighted an article (say after tagging it as read!?).  No idea if this would work for anyone...  [of course it doesn't nicely summarize they key points from the article in the Evernote note, but this might be something better done by you, as that should improve retention/comprehension of the content]

[This is based on my approach of printing articles from Chrome to a PDF into an evernote import folder (for automatic import into my inbox).  I do this so I can highlight and markup a well formatted PDF using the builtin Foxit readers (in Evernote for Windows 6.7.5), so that I also have a printable and sharable copy of the marked up article, or almost any source material saved in PDF format.]

But this goes against the grain of Evernote's web clipper and probably how others use Evernote, so take it for what it's worth.

[laohu 2]

Hello,

Bumping an old threat.

I'm running the IFTTT "append Instapaper highlights to Evernote". This is working, except that the highlights are not added to the full article in EN as shown by @chrimer but all in a separate note.

What am I doing wrong here?