Highlights: PDF Reader & Notes Reviews

by BM42

Apple files/preview/notes already does nearly everything Highlights does. For me to use your app on a regular basis, even if free, it has to provide some additional functionality over what the free Apple apps do. I was disappointed that export annotations is not available in the free version. You can export by using print and save to PDF. In short, there is no value add over Apple’s free apps, therefore, no incentive for me to use it, like it and reward the developer by upgrading to the pro version. With everyone vying for subscriptions rather than straight up selling an app the old way, you got to give me something of value before I break out my wallet. Thanks.

by Kkuluuk

Highlights is great... on Mac. Their Mac version works wonders with bunch of customization options. And as a researcher who does most of the article reading on my iPad, I’m so glad to see Highlights on iPad.

EXCEPT it does not work. Perhaps the most frustrating issue is the annotating itself. This simple task of highlighting and leaving notes does not work because it WON’T BE SAVED. Literally. When I close a document and open it up again, my annotations are randomly gone. This is not acceptable.

Highlights itself is a very well made app, which brings “most” of the functionality of the Mac version to iPad while being fully optimized for iPadOS even with cursor support. I’ll be waiting for the fix to the saving issue. Until then, I have no choice but to open up my Mac.

by Gathly

I want to like Highlights. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for for years. I paid immediately for pro so I could export this app into Evernote. This is a wonderful feature. However every third or fourth highlight causes Highlights to freeze totally. Nothing in Highlights is responsive. In order to get it working again, I have to fully close Highlights , swiping up, from the open apps view, and it will still load frozen multiple times. Some times that works and I'll get a few more this app in before it freezes again. Then I have to fully restart the iPad. If Highlights worked the way it was supposed to, it would be my dream app. I have a brand new ipad pro that I bought a week ago that is fully up to date.

by F_woods

The intended function of Highlights would have been perfect for my needs, if only it worked the way it was supposed too. It will be working perfectly then suddenly the text that I’ve highlighted will turn into black lines that are unreadable. Sometimes it will convert other previously highlighted text that were once readable into black lines. There’s is essentially no customer support- the website says to email with questions or concerns but nobody ever wrote back. I was really excited about Highlights but it is disappointing it doesn’t work as it should.

by Mymy312

Every single time I highlight something, a little notification comes up telling me live highlighting is on. It’s very annoying I can’t seem to make it go away.

Update
It works better if the document is a pdf rather scanned pages from a book. It still is a little glitchy where I’ll highlight something and the live annotations notification comes, or I’ll highlight something and it doesn’t highlight the words I’ve selected correctly. I’ve also noticed that when that notification pops up and I continue to annotate, it will create copies of the document with the one annotation I just did. It says I can turn it off in settings, but I don’t see it unless I have to get the pro version for that. Which I’m not doing.

by Sebastian Schrodinger

I really want to like Highlights and use it. I love its highlighter feature. It's very convenient to markup passages. I haven't found another PDF viewer with a similar approach, which motivated me to subscribe to Highlights .

But Highlights has let me down one to many times, and it seems Highlights doesn't get regular support from the developer. Today, I was trying to use the find command to search for a word and the textbox to type in the word disappeared and could not be summoned with either the keyboard shortcut or the menu bar item. This has happened twice the last three days. Highlights doesn't allow you to rotate pages, which is useful for better viewing tables in research articles. I have to use Preview to do this.

I have reached out to the developer before, but never received a reply, and missing essential features are not included in the infrequent updates.

Again, I wanted to like Highlights . But today I have decided to discontinue my subscription.

by Dsqrtx

I really like the highlighting capabilities, when they work that is. Plain highlighting usually works ok, but little details have bugs. Like, say I have a highlight that spans multiple pages. Half the time, that doesn’t work, and some strange area vaguely related to what I selected ends up being highlighted. So I have to delete the highlight and try again. Usually I end up making two separate this app. Or, say I select some text and I end up missing a word or two, so I want to expand the selection. Good luck getting that to work. It’s easier to delete the selection and try again. And again. But I could deal with little nits lick that if only Highlights could remember what location I’ve read up to in the document. I don’t know how many times I’ve read 10 or 20 pages of a document, then come back the next day, and Highlights places me on page one again, and I have to figure out where I left off. Then I read another 10 or 20 pages, come back the next day, and Highlights puts me on page one again. So, I wrote to the developer to ask for help with that. No response. Nothing. I like the idea, but Highlights doesn’t feel complete. I see the other reviews and I wonder how they aren’t seeing the same problems I am.

by Jason 909

I want this to be my pdf note taking app so badly! Unfortunately I can’t give it more than 2 stars because its core functionality—annotating PDFs—is too buggy. Text selection goes haywire if your document has footnotes, so you wind up highlighting and pulling half a page of disordered text into your notes. There’s no ability to clean that up, too, so I keep finding myself stuck with important info I can’t highlight, which kind of defeats the purpose of Highlights. I’d be willing to pay for this to drive development and new features, but I’m not willing to pay to beta test core functionality. Hopefully this will improve in short order. I’ll update this if it does, because like I said, Highlights is conceptually what I’ve wanted for years and I hope it’s successful!

by Bride Of Squid

I love the idea of Highlights; being able to easily pull out all my highlighted material from an article I’m reading into a separate file is a functionality I’ve been looking for for a while (LiquidText kind of does this, but I find the interface clunky and less useful than I had hoped). But too often the highlighting doesn’t work: I select text, and it randomly this app the whole page (guessing superscripts are the problem, as someone else mentioned). Some of my this app stick while others randomly disappear. I also dislike that I can’t write annotations in the margins—the whole advantage of the Apple Pencil for research is that I don’t have to use the keyboard when I’m reading to mark down quick notes in the margins. I would enthusiastically pay for Highlights if it did what it advertises reliably, and even more so if I could write marginalia; but in its present form it isn’t really useable.

by 31416pai

I have used Highlights in my Mac for years, and was waiting expectantly for its iOS version because I prefer to read and annotate PDFs in my iPad.
This is a promising first iteration, although it still misses a few things to take full advantage of the flexibility of annotating with the pencil.
What is a major bummer is the reliance on the “rent-your-app” model. Just charge a fair price for the full app!
I try very hard not to use subscription-based apps and, given the level of crippled features in the free version of this app, I can’t see it making it to my list of needed apps. Too bad..

by DrJJWMac

I had high hopes for Highlights to annotate PDFs collected as a background bibliography for review to prepare a science/engineering publication. But not in its current version.

* Markdown export does not include the images. This eliminates my intent to use sophisticated, markdown-aware tools (e.g. Obsidian) to manage the exported annotation content. The lack of this ability alone leaves me with no greater power than my current go-to PDF editor app across macOS and iPadOS.

* There is no way to clear the (exhaustive) list of recent files on the iPadOS app.

* As another review noted, you will end in the File Editor and can inadvertently delete a folder or file from some other app (this may be a problem for other iPadOS apps due solely to the poor control in the Files app itself and if so should raise a red flag that apps should only be able to READ in the File directory, not muck about in it fully).

* After you highlight a text region, you will not easily be able to adjust it. Essentially, the best if not only viable way to short or lengthen the highlight is to delete it and remake it.

On the plus side, this app appears to work well dynamically with other PDF-editing apps (e.g. Devonthink, Bookends), both on macOS and iPadOS.

Finally, I hope that a future update will allow a user to put tags on annotations (as possible in apps such as MarginNote or ZenReader).

by Asi Es Cierto

As much as I really like Highlights, it still does not allow for deep linking. This is a huge oversight.

When Skim, a PDF program far inferior (and free) to this one can do it there's no real reason why this one shouldn't be able to do it.

I will continue to reduce stars until it is or becomes available or we're down to one.

Being able to get my notes out in markdown is spectacular. Highlights also is very stable.

The developer tries to use the excuse that he's a one-man shop. That is certainly his prerogative. However the price does not reflect that. It is a premium priced app. It very much needs to have deep linking.

The developer, basically just doesn't respond as you can tell by the reviews if you read any of them, even though in the documentation he says he will.

I'm very happy to pay for this (and I do pay for the pro) and deep linking needs to be included ASAP along with being able to export pictures and images.

There is a number of things that could take Highlights from real good to incredible. Let's get a move on.

7 Aug. 2022 - still no deep linking. One more star knocked off. Three stars now. ***

by Kim Ok-Jin

Desktop version is much more stable, but on iPad my initial text selection highlight is invisible so I can’t see what is going to be highlighted. It’s a major bug that makes it unusable on iPad. Similar comments to others that it has issues highlighting text across page breaks and will sometimes capture footnotes and page numbers. Additionally, when the annotations are ordered by color, I can’t click on them to jump to the highlight, which is the primary way I organize my notes. This is so close, but a few major bugs or missing features that make it incomplete. It’s such a great concept, and I paid for pro, but unfortunately after close to 6 months there have been few noticeable improvements.

by AJ Mac25

It is hard to believe the much of the functions for Highlights are not contained in other PDF reader apps. (Apple: Preview, please).

I bought this soley to be able to export PDF annotatiions mainly this app as a summary or into Evernote. This worked fine until recent updates in Mac OS. Now the Mac version of Highlights appears to no longer be supported by the developer.

I have sent emails to support but no updates or return emails. I hope the developer releases a new update soon. If not, I guess it is time to cancel my subscription and look for a new way to do these needed functions.

by Konstantinos3000

the notes contain page links which are very useful, as they can take you back to the pdf. However, these page links do not work when you open the note in a different device. For example, you took the note on your ipad and you try to open the page link on your Mac? Good luck with that

I am not sure what the issue is, but if it doesn’t work well across the various apple devices, then this is a major limitation

by Tripp88

Key feature that would make this near perfect: the ability to group this app together. I'm studying med/surgery texts, so frequently highlight only short segments of sentences/paragraphs, rather than entire paragraphs. Would be awesome if I could group these together e.g. if a paragraph is describing a surgical technique, I could group the 2-3 this app I made and add a group title with the name of the surgery. This is how my notes would ideally look if i was writing them out myself - will save significant time creating notes (especially going back over old this app), which can then be exported and turned into flashcards e.g. with RemNotes. Liquidtext and Marginnotes kind of do this, but the output and user interface is bad and most of us don't need mind maps for everything.

Draw/pen tool would also be cool but not as cool as the above feature.

by Jacob R. Campbell

I love this app, but it is most useful for reading and going through and doing just what the name implies. The one thing that I feel like it lacks is the search within a PDF is not as intuitive or easy to use. It is still there but is inferior. Sometimes I find myself having to open up even preview to improve my searching (gives me a visual display of pages that have the terms, this app them, and gives me arrows to scroll through the results along with a presented number of results). this app has none of these, unfortunately.

by Malshar@gmail

I like Highlights and the concept for research articles ... I enjoyed the UI and the design overall. When I looked into the pro options, I foun them to be valuable tools and provide excellent convinience. With all that said, I wish teh developer would have set a one time fee for the pro options rather than a subscription based pro version. I do not comprehend the concept of subscription for set tools. In conclusion, this is why i did not give Highlights a star rating.

by FA8LES

I really like Highlights so far. I’ve been looking for something like this that puts this app into a notes page for me.

However I wish I could click on any highlight from the notes, and be taken to the page in the pdf. When using multiple highlight colors, my notes don’t seem to list them by page and only by color.

If that’s not possible, if the notes were sorted by page and then by color on that page, it could really help maybe?

I do want the pro version of Highlights, but I really wish I could buy it outright, like goodnotes, and just buy each “new” and improved version ex goodnotes 5 etc.

At the moment, I don’t think I would subscribe to apps but I plan to keep trying this out and see! If the note sorting had a few options that would be great.

Still an A+ app!

by Tf2

I need to be able to read PDFs, highlight/underline in different colors and take notes that stay with the document but also are available on an external file. This does all of that beautifully. I can come up with all kinds of extra features I’d like it to include (and have), but the existing features work perfectly and make it so much easier to work with PDFs. (In fact, now I wish it worked with web pages as well...)

by JTLaw25

I do a ton of research on the job - studies, reports, legislative issues and this tool is making it so much easier to find the important stuff again! I did have an initial problem that I couldn't get the program to allow me to highlight text, I wrote to the developer and received an instant response that the pdf's needing to be OCR'd to be able to use this app. Once I did that with the docs, they all have worked great. After I save as a PDF, I share it with OneNote and copy the info I have saved off to the side. Saving me tons of time for creating presentations. Thank you so much this app!!!

by Palm12345

Really like the stability of Highlights and how its UI and design is consistent with Apple’s operating system.

This is a good app for users who read a lot of research articles. Used it for a couple hours when writing a paper and it was overall a good experience.

Features that would make me a long time user are:
- adding table of contents. For PDFs of textbooks, this is a necessity.
- add the ability to draw on documents with the Apple Pencil. I spent sometime trying to figure out if this was already a feature, but I don’t think it is.
- Add tabs on the iPad. While you can open multiple windows in iPadOS, it is often more convenient to have tabs.
- Ability to add images from photo library in documents

Ive been looking for an alternative to PDFExpert for a while now. If Highlights adds these features, I’ll switch.

by Beckyobecskter

I incidentally found out that I have more color options by re-highlighting different colors over each other. Makes my notes much prettier. In addition, I was on the go once with only my phone, not my tablet. I was easily able to sync up to my tablets progress and pick up where I left off since I saved it to the iCloud. Thank goodness for this feature! Saves me time and gives me relief to be able to use Highlights to keep track of all my research articles for school. Now if I can only figure out how to use some type of subfolders to organize everything even more…

by Bupadhyaya

I don't normally write review for the apps but this one diserves it. I am a PhD student and read a lot of pdfs and this app make it so much easier to highlight, underline, comment and annotation overview us just at a different level. OCR is always right and better than adobe or pdf expert.

Suggestions:
- Please add tab overview to look at all the pages at once.
- Many pdf readers have implemented ctrl/opt/cmd plus mouse scroll for zoom in and out like on a windows computer which even works with magic mouse.

Thank you.

by TCSJT

I do a ton of research on the job - studies, reports, legislative issues and this tool is making it so much easier to find the important stuff again! I did have an initial problem that I couldn't get the program to allow me to highlight text, I wrote to the developer and received an instant response that the pdf's needing to be OCR'd to be able to use this app. Once I did that with the docs, they all have worked great. After I save as a PDF, I share it with OneNote and copy the info I have saved off to the side. Saving me tons of time for creating presentations. Thank you so much this app!!!

by BruceJiangcs

As a researcher, I have to read extensively for a number of topics; this means that I need a good tool to collect important points (argument, evidence, conclusion, future directions...). Before I used this app, I jotted down all the possiblly useful quotes on a notebook (traditional or electronic one). By so doing, i have felt more comfortable as i knew i kept the records of those significant points. However, it is illusionary, because i often forgot where I put those notes. Hightlights can a life-saver, because the hightlighted lines can be easily exported as a searchable pdf. Toegther with pdf search tools, notes and hightlighted quotes can be easily accessible, no matter how many pdfs I have on my computer.

by Ghoetker

Hiughlights is an elegant, low friction way to take notes on and annotate a PDF, which can be easily exported to a variety of sources. Because it is based on PDFkit, notes and annotations are equally accessible in Preview, Acrobat, etc. So, there is no lock in. The developer has also been very active in responding to user requests and adding new features. Well worth using and supporting!

by Longtime Audiblesubs

I paid a pro subscription because I thought the Export to Evernote was a killer feature. Bad news: the export to evernote feature is not working, I tried updating both apps and tried it in two different computers without success.

To make things worse, the support you get from the developer is non-exitent. I reached out with the issue and it took the developer 17 days to respond with an apology and no solution.

by <not Available>

Almost a year has passed since Highlights had a macOS version update -- while the developer has made regular updates on the iPad. None of the new features ever make it to the Mac. It is becoming increasing unrealistic to expect that the Mac version of this app will be around much longer, since it never receives any maintenance updates.