Highlights Canvas — Mindmap and Study Your Book's Highlights
Turn your PDF or EPUB highlights into an interactive mindmap. Auto-layout by chapter, draw your own connections, group themes, and review with flashcards. Free, in-browser, no upload.
About Highlights Canvas — Mindmap and Study Your Book's Highlights
Open any book you've highlighted in our PDF or EPUB editor and see every passage on a single canvas. Switch between three auto-layouts (radial, horizontal tree, chapter clusters), drop into a custom view to draw typed connections (supports, conflicts, example of, extends, question), add sticky notes, group highlights into themes, tag freely, and turn each highlight into a spaced-repetition flashcard. Everything runs in your browser — your notes never leave your device.
What Is the Highlights Canvas?
The Highlights Canvas is a free in-browser workspace that turns your annotations into a mindmap. After you've highlighted passages in our PDF or EPUB editor, open this tool to see every highlight at once — organised by chapter, freely positionable, and connectable. It is built for students, researchers, and anyone who reads to understand rather than just to consume.
How It Works
Highlight passages in the PDF or EPUB editor. Click File → Open in Canvas. The canvas reads your highlights from your browser's storage — same origin, same device — and shows them in your chosen layout. Switch between Standard (auto-laid-out) and Custom (free positioning with typed connections) views as you work. Tag, group, and connect highlights to surface relationships across chapters. When you find a passage you want to remember, add it to flashcards.
Privacy and Storage
Like every tool on Ciphertides, the Highlights Canvas runs entirely in your browser. Your highlights, connections, notes, and flashcard schedule live in your browser's local storage — never uploaded, never shared. Clearing your browser data clears the canvas; backing up the canvas via export is a planned paid-tier feature.
Three Standard Layouts, One Set of Highlights
Radial places the book title in the centre with chapters fanning outward — best for books with 4 to 10 chapters where you want to feel the whole shape at once. Horizontal tree stacks chapters vertically with highlights branching to the right — scales cleanly from short books to 50+ chapters and reads top-to-bottom in chapter order. Chapter clusters draw each chapter as a soft bubble with its highlights gridded inside — quieter visuals, ideal as a substrate for adding your own connections.
Connecting Highlights to Understand Relationships
Custom view lets you drag any highlight anywhere and draw connections between any two. Each connection has a type: supports (green), conflicts (red dashed), example of (blue), extends (purple), question (orange dotted), or a free-text custom label. Add sticky notes for synthesis, your take, or open questions. Group highlights into named themes (e.g. "Power and order") that follow their members across the canvas.
Flashcards from Your Highlights
The Flashcards mode turns every highlight into a spaced-repetition card. Question side shows the chapter and a short teaser; flip to reveal the full passage. Rate Again, Hard, Good, or Easy to schedule the next review using the SM-2 algorithm. Set how many new cards to learn per day. All scheduling state is stored locally per book.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to upload my book to use this tool?
No. The Highlights Canvas reads highlights you've already made in our PDF or EPUB editor — which are stored in your browser's local storage on your device. Nothing is uploaded.
Will my canvas sync across devices?
Not in the free tier. Canvas state lives in your browser's local storage on the device you're using. Cross-device sync and shareable read-only URLs are planned for a future paid tier.
What happens if I delete a highlight in the editor?
The next time the canvas tab refocuses, it diffs your editor's current highlights against the canvas state and removes any highlight that's gone. Connections, tags, and group memberships involving the removed highlight are cleaned up too — sticky notes and theme groups themselves stay.
Can I import a canvas from a friend or another device?
Not in v1. We've laid the groundwork for a drag-and-drop .canvas.json import that will ship in a future paid release.
Why don't I see my book in the picker?
Make sure you've highlighted at least one passage in our editor and that you're using the same browser on the same device. The canvas tool only discovers books whose highlights are stored in this browser's local storage.