New Features

A whole new dark appearance for PDFs with smart content handling: text and backgrounds are changed while images and annotations are left untouched. Set your preferred appearance in Settings > General > PDF Appearance or from the menu bar under View > PDF Appearance. The Auto Dark setting will automatically match the PDF appearance to the system appearance.

The new dark appearance for PDFs requires macOS 26.

Minor improvements

• Updated Introduction Guide
• Increased size of thumbnails
• Updated export icons
• Fixed a formatting issue when printing or saving notes as PDF on macOS 26.2

Minor improvement

• Fixed an issue preventing certain types of internal links and URL-schemes in comments from working

Minor improvements

• Fixed centering of tables in notes
• Fix for pdfView backgroundColor appearing light grey in Night appearance in Dark Mode on macOS 26

New Features

Liquid Glass design on macOS 26 Tahoe with a new app icon, transparent toolbar and floating sidebar. The app icon now also adapts to dark and tinted modes! Menu bar actions now include icons to make them easier to find at a glance.

New languages are also available for OCR and text recognition in image selections: Turkish, Indonesian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Malay, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.

macOS 26 will officially be released on Monday September 15th.

Minor improvement

• Fixed a crash related to grabbing image selections on first parse

New Features

Automatic language detection and support for more languages when using text recognition on images and tables (on Macs running macOS 13 Ventura or newer).

The new languages are: Cantonese (China mainland), Cantonese (Hong Kong), Korean, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic (Modern Standard), Arabic (Najdi)

Thai and Vietnamese Requires macOS 14 Sonoma. Arabic requires macOS 15 Sequoia.

Improvement

• Existing image selections will no longer keep the previous aspect ratio when resized

Improvements

• Smoother resizing of image selections
• Image selections from rotated pages now grab the expected area

Improvement

• Fixed an issue with Pro features potentially not being recognized on first parse

Improvement

• Fixed an issue that could prevent images from appearing in notes

Improvement

• Fixed an issue that could cause inactive page links

Improvement

• Improved thread safety

Improvement

• Improved thread safety

Improvement

• Fixed a memory leak

Improvement

• Fixed a potential crash on launch

Improvement

• Fixed a potential crash on launch on macOS 11 and earlier

macOS 14 Sonoma is out and Highlights is already fully compatible, but this update brings some major performance improvements:

Major improvements

• Up to 5x faster conversion of image selections to images
• Up to 7x faster text recognition
• Up to 5x faster table recognition
• Up to 5x faster loading of PDF pages
• Faster opening of files

Minor improvements

• Fixed a crash related to tracking of user setting updates
• Remove null characters if present in the text of markup annotations
• Improved jumping between search results
• Improved Smart Copy when getting text of markup annotations
• Improved handling of highlights:// links

Improvement

• Fixed a bug introduced in 2023.1.1 where Pro users enabling the “Save Sidecar Markdown-file”-setting would get a blank Preference panel

Improvements

• Added a setting for Pro users to never be prompted for metadata fetches (General > Fetch Metadata > “Manual”)
• Fixed a bug where in rare cases the document would be unnecessary reloaded while running AutoSave
• Fixed a bug where null characters in annotation comments could stop annotation extraction

New features

Highlights can now automatically OCR documents:

• Smart OCR: Use Live Text to copy uncopyable text from any PDF document and automatically embed it as OCR. This way non-searchable PDFs will become searchable as you search and text inside images will become text as soon as you try to select it. All processing is done on device in the background without you having to initiate it. Smart!

Smart OCR requires macOS 13 Ventura or later and works with English, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian text on hardware that supports Live Text.

Improvement

• Resolved a longstanding bug with network error messages popping up for a small set of users when opening files

New features

The macOS 13 Ventura update! Bringing the Mac version up to speed by adding a lot of highly requested features:

• New Table of Contents view in sidebar for navigating books and other large PDFs
• A new color palette: Light! Light is a semi-transparent color palette for those of you who wanted something even more subtle than Pastel for your annotations and notes
• Automatically fetch metadata for scientific articles from arXiv - the open-access archive with more than 2 million preprints and postprints
• Save a copy of the PDF without annotations from the File menu (e.g. to share the original document with a colleague or friend)
• Print the PDF without annotations by disabling the “Include Annotations” in the Highlights section of the print dialog

Improvements

• Preferences has been renamed to Settings on macOS 13 Ventura
• The background color behind the PDF when using night appearance is now black (no longer inverted in dark mode)
• Fixed an issue where some toolbar buttons would appear too narrow
• Fixed an issue with receipt validation related to AirPlay speakers when using an ethernet connection
• Faster and more precise categorization of annotations into color categories (e.g. when sorting by colors)
• Added support for DOIs with longer prefixes
• ”#### Header” instead of “#### Header ####” in category and annotation headers
• Fixed a bug where the notes view could turn blank after the app was in the background for a prolonged time
• Changed default setting for text wrapping in exported Markdown to off for new installations

Minor improvements

• The text wrapping setting now also applies for Markdown export with markup (bold, underlined, strikethrough..)
• Bear export now includes an empty line after annotation spacers
• Quiver export now uses “—” for annotation spacers
• Removed duplicate whitespace between citation and Markdown links in citations

New features

• Lots of new tutorials! (Help > Tutorials)
• New default orange accent color

Major improvements

• Updated export icons for Ulysses, Bear, DEVONthink and Keep It
• #hashtags in annotation comments are now recognized as inline tags and displayed in your notes
• Exporting to DEVONthink as a folder of snippets (Split files) applies #hashtags as file tags
• Bear export now supports highlight, underline and strikethrough text markup
• DEVONthink export now supports highlight and strikethrough text markup
• Keep It export now supports highlight and strikethrough text markup
• Quiver export now uses Markdown syntax for strikethrough
• Improved DOI-link recognition (incl. PNAS, The Lancet)

Minor improvements

• Fixed a bug where the notes view would not sync scroll position for pages with different page label from index
• Citation links in Markdown documents now use Markdown syntax instead of HTML syntax

New design

• New app icon!
• Fresh new toolbar layout with large, beautiful icons and improved spacing
• Beautiful full-height sidebar
• New subtitle in the toolbar showing the page numbering
• Search field in the toolbar expands automatically depending on the available space
• Much improved preferences layout and navigation
• New preference pane icons make it feel right at home on macOS 11
• Cleaner menubar with PDF navigation features in a separate Go-menu

New features

• Support for Apple Silicon based Macs
• PDF appearances (Default, Sepia and Night - try the latter for a truly dark Dark mode)
• Dictionary lookup right from the text selection popover
• Better language support for text/table recognition (added German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese)
• Export as WebArchive (requires Pro)

Other improvements

• Navigate previous/next page using left/right arrow keys (when the PDF view is active)
• Changed previous/next page commands to Alt-Up/Alt-Down

Colorful new features

• A lighter default set of colors for PDF markup
• Optional color sets to choose from: Pastel, Bright and Retro (Preferences > Annotation)
• Notes now show the annotation colors in the quote borders
• Notes can also reflect the text formatting of the annotation (Preferences > Note Format)
• You can customize the color set for notes to be the same or different from the markup set

Other improvements

• Fixed an issue where a subset of PDFs would not correctly autosave annotations after the first save
• Text changes to comments are now saved when changing colors/types in the annotation popover
• Reordered the colors in the popover and menus
• Improved color sorting accuracy for color categories
• Citation lookup now handles citations with ‘&’-characters correctly
• Exporting to DEVONthink as Split files now handle annotation with inline citations correctly
• Lots of minor improvements to the annotating experience

Minor improvements

• Hide/unhide commands in the menu bar now work as expected
• Fixes an issue with images not being displayed in notes on some devices

Minor improvement

• Preferences window is now correctly centered on initial display

Minor improvements

• Highlights now uses the window size and split view divider positions of the last active window when opening a new PDF
• The initial size of windows and first launch experience is now more optimized on smaller screens
• Cascading of windows now happens from the last active window when opening multiple PDF documents

New feature

• Support for tags when exporting to Bear

Minor improvements

• Export to DEVONthink with the Split Files option enabled now works as expected (exports each annotation as an individual file)
• Export to nvAlt and Quiver as Markdown now works as expected

New feature

• Interact with the text and images in the notes panel and share via drag and drop (Requires Pro)

Minor improvement

• Improved compatibility with markup from other PDF readers (missing characters from text selections)

Minor improvements

• Improved accuracy for sorting annotations in both single and multi-column PDFs
• Fixed a bug where keyboard navigation focus for controls could prevent the user from copying the current text selection

Minor improvements

• Optimized images: Notes now optimize image files to improve speed and reduce the size of exported TextBundles and HTML files
• Added option to change the image quality in Preferences -> Export (Default is optimized, change to Original for highest quality)

Minor improvements

• Option for including Annotation Spacer in Notes (Preferences -> Note Format)
• Note annotations are now sorted correctly according to their position on a page (top to bottom)
• The page is no longer automatically zoomed out when changing the page in the thumbnails sidebar if zoomed in

Minor improvements

• Fixed a bug where Smart Copy of tables with merged cells would give the wrong output
• Adds support for older versions of macOS Catalina (10.15)

New feature

• Adds support for exporting directly to DEVONthink 3

Please reinstall the AppleScript in Preferences → Export → “Install DEVONthink Script” to use DEVONthink page links in the exported files.

New features

• Support for Dark Mode on macOS Mojave

New features

• Export notes directly to Keep It (replaces Together)
• Privacy update: removes Hockey App crash reporting framework and adds privacy policy

Minor improvements

• Lots of memory improvements
• The underline power tool can now handle multiple unnumbered references across multiple pages
• Fixed issue where moving or renaming files could crash the app due to sandbox issue with sidecar markdown files
• Fixed issue where manual metadata lookups could result in a crash

New features

• Smoother experience when annotating on macOS Sierra and High Sierra
• Interface now remembers size and position of both window and split view dividers

Minor improvements

• Fixes glitches when adding/removing annotations
• Fixes issue with permission for saving sidecar files

New features

• Improves compatibility with macOS High Sierra (10.13)
• Adds support for MultiMarkdown equations using MathJax (Disabled by default. Preferences –> Markdown)
• Adds compatibility for exporting to the new version of Ulysses

Minor improvements

• Fixes an issue where the app would get very slow when sorting annotations spanning multiple text columns
• Lots of bug fixes

New features

• Tabs in macOS Sierra

Minor improvements

• Improved support for macOS Sierra
• Better search highlighting
• Link to Tutorials in Help-menu

Fixes

• Fixes issue where only one reference was showing when multiple unnumbered references were underlined

New features

• Improved PDF reading on large screens: display two pages side-by-side
• Better PDF browsing experience: back and forward buttons
• Both the sidebar and notes panel can now be collapsed
• PDF Thumbnails resizes as you change the width of the sidebar
• Use DEVONthink PDF-links when exporting (Install AppleScript in Preferences–> Export)

Minor improvements

• Cleaned up keyboard shortcuts for managing layout of elements in window
• Cleaned up toolbar buttons
• Duplicate PDF when saving Adobe ClearScan files (to prevent destroying OCR layer of original file)

Fixes

• Fixes Yosemite bug where the window would display nothing due to a partially collapsed sidebar

New Features

• Export to Quiver: each annotation is exported as a Quiver-cell + support for images and tags
• Split files: Export annotations as individual HTML/Markdown-files to a folder or directly to DEVONthink
• Tagging split files: tag individual annotations using “@tag” syntax in the annotations note field
• MultiMarkdown Citekey: copy metadata for current PDF as MultiMarkdown Citekey to pasteboard
• MultiMarkdown Reference: copy metadata for current PDF as MultiMarkdown Reference to pasteboard
• Preference: file name based on document or metadata title when exporting

Minor Improvements

• Underlined references that have not been cited in the text now show up in Preview (not only in Edit)
• Preference to automatically lowercase all tags
• “Export to PDF” now adds a “Highlights” to the suggested name to prevent overwriting the currently open PDF
• Improved speed when handling PDFs with many pages
• Improved speed when handling PDFs with many references
• Added custom Finder file icon for when Highlights is set as system PDF reader

Fixes

• Export to nvALT now support multiple tags
• Change annotation color using keyboard is now working again
• Page number now show up in annotation headers as expected

New Features

• Collapsible sidebar

Fixes

• Fixes bug where the split view panes would be collapsed when opening a PDF
• Fixes bug where export to Textbundle would not include Markdown text
• Stability improvements (threading issues)

Improvements

• Better UI performance
• Custom plaintext format with direct export to pasteboard (CMD+Y)
• Faster image grabbing from PDF

Fixes

• Bugs from the future

This version of Highlights drops support for 10.9 to enable use of new interface frameworks in OS X.

Improvements

• Bookends integration
• Preference to set Reference manager
• Keyboard shortcut for sorting annotations by color

Fixes

• No preference pane was selected when opening preferences
• Performance improvements

New features

• Popup PDF annotation tools
• Export to nvALT
• Export to Together
• Icon makeover

Minor improvements

• Toolbar now shows currently selected annotation color
• Improved control over export format
• Option to disable headers completely
• Option to turn off text wrapping
• Option to turn on automatic tab-switching (Markdown-mode)
• Cleaned up preference-window

Fixes

• Page range now uses en-dash, not a hyphen
• Exporting to Ulysses now removes page breaks (horizontal lines)
• Missing Export to Ulysses-option in main menu

New features

• Export to Ulysses

Minor improvements

• The sticky note tool is now automatically deselected after use
• The image selection tool is now automatically deselected after use

Fixes

• Annotation spacers not included on first launch
• One character long highlighted text causing a crash
• Scroll sync glitches when near top of preview and edit views
• Fixes issues with exporting Markdown with MMD-metadata included as header
• Popup-elements only added to annotations with attached comments

Improvements

• Markdown/TextBundle sidecar-files are only saved if enabled in Preferences
• More robust syntax for sticky notes using horizontal line elements instead of italics
• Underlined text is turned into bold text when extracting
• Tagging/References power user features are only active if enabled in Preferences
• HockeyApp integration for crash reporting

Fixes

• Text notes outside annotations are turned into sticky notes (text no longer disappears)
• “Fetch metadata”-dialog no longer reappears after hitting cancel
• “Fetch metadata”-dialog only presented if PDF has a DOI
• App no longer shows a blank window when the default PT Mono font is unavailable
• Black annotation color replaced with gray
• Improved insertion point selection for annotations with spacers
• If a PDF-file is moved, the URL-scheme bookmark for the file is updated

Minor improvements

• Link to FAQ from help menu
• Link to Release notes from help menu
• Link to Feedback submission from help menu

Fixes

• Insertion point improvements
• Tags not showing up in Finder for PDFs
• RGB values for color categorization refined

Fixes

• Sticky notes resetting to “New comment” placeholder
• Markdown comments were in some cases not synced to the PDF
• More accurate insertion point selection in text editor for newly added annotations
• Reading PDFs with blank annotations could in some cases crash the app
• Purple and pink was sorted as one color

New features

• PDF search
• Page-links:
  • clicking links in the Preview-window will scroll the PDF to that page
  • clicking link in exported HTML-file/Evernote/DEVONthink, will open Highlights and scroll to linked page
• URL-scheme (backend for page-links):
  • Open file: highlights://Users/test.pdf
  • Open file on a specific page: highlights://Users/test.pdf#page=3
• Performance improvements:
  • New MultiMarkdown parser: should handle books and PDFs with lots of annotations better
  • Improved asynchronous PDF saving (no interface lockup)
  • Snappier Markdown-to-PDF sync

Fixes

• Adding an annotation to a page with no other annotations resulted in wrong text selection in the editor
• Incorrect meta-tag for UTF-8 charset in HTML caused issues on some systems
• Annotation could in some cases end up on the previous or next page when scrolled far down or up as the page being annotated was not accurately determined
• Lots of crash-fixes

New features

• New PDF tool: sticky notes
• Scroll positions in sync
  • changing the page of the PDF, scrolls the extracted annotations list to the same page
  • scroll position of view and edit are kept at the same point
• Annotation colors
• Color-coding: give each color a name and sort annotations by their color
• Improved sync between extracted annotations and PDF annotations:
  • removing an annotation in the text editor, removes it in the PDF as well
  • adding a note in the text editor, adds a sticky note in the PDF
• Annotation headers: include subheading over each annotation with page, category, color, type, author and/or date information
• Annotation spacers: separate annotations by a horizontal line
• ATX-style Markdown headers (#h1# and ##h2##)
• Papers.app integration: open links in Papers. If the PDF is present in your Papers library it will be opened directly, otherwise Papers will attempt to fetch the article
• Better cursor visibility in text editor: cursor changes color to white when over the dark background of the text editor

Fixes

• Tags are now written to both PDF and Markdown files when “Embed tags” preference is selected
• Performance improvements

Fixes

• Links inside the PDF are clickable again
• Issue with parsing of PDF Text-notes to italics resolved
• The “Fetch metadata”-dialog no longer keeps popping back after hitting cancel
• PDF metadata is not written unless it is different from the empty header
• Document no longer shows edited status before actually being edited
• Switching between View and Edit mode is now per document
• Maximum length of suggested tags (underlined words) set to 30 characters, to prevent mixup with bad references
• Added export-icon for TextBundle-files
• Username and modification date metadata added to annotations modified or created in Highlights

Initial release (changes from beta)

• New app icon and interface redesign
• Native TextBundle support (see textbundle.org)
• Preference for setting default font and size for Markdown editing
• New introduction guide
• Minor bugfixes