eMarker for Windows

We were underwhelmed by this program's ability to mark up a Web page, and found the options too few and the steps too many. eMarker only works on MHT files, so you'll have to save the Web page first. Instead of guiding you through the process, you're left on your own to figure it out.

In fact, eMarker gets off on the wrong foot from the beginning. Each time it launched, we got an error message that we had to open a file or document first. Since there was no prompt to do so, this was a confusing first impression. The interface is simply organized but the overall design looks dated. The command buttons at the top include a mix of basic browser navigation options (move back and forth between pages, refresh, and stop) and formatting options (bold, italic, and underline). If you have a Web page open in Internet Explorer, eMarker will automatically pull up that page, but that's the last action it helps you with. Once your page appears, the formatting buttons are grayed out and can't be accessed. The program's Help file didn't provide answers, but a trip to the publisher's Web site turned up a few, brief user instructions. You first have to go to the program's File menu and save the page in MHT format to your hard drive. Once you have the MHT file open, you can highlight text on the page in a variety of colors, and change the format of text to bold, underlined, or italicized. You can't add notes, and there's no freehand drawing tool, features that would make the tool much more useful. The demo version limits you to altering three characters at a time, something else you'll find out only after you try and highlight more characters.

Although eMarker did allow us to highlight and change text format, it offers too little to justify the price. We suggest you find a more effective and intuitive program to note important elements of a Web page.