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 pane 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