Changelog

macOS Version 2022.1

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

macOS Version 2021.1.1

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

macOS Version 2021.1

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

macOS Version 2020.3

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

macOS Version 2020.2

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

macOS Version 2020.1.9

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

macOS Version 2020.1.8

Minor improvement

  • Preferences window is now correctly centered on initial display

macOS Version 2020.1.7

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

macOS Version 2020.1.6

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

macOS Version 2020.1.5

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)

macOS Version 2020.1.4

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

macOS Version 2020.1.3

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)

macOS Version 2020.1.2

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

macOS Version 2020.1.1

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)

Version 1.5.6

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.

Version 1.5.5

New features

  • Support for Dark Mode on macOS Mojave

Version 1.5.4

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

Version 1.5.3

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

Version 1.5.2

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

Version 1.5.1

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

Version 1.5

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

Version 1.4

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

Version 1.3.3

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)

Version 1.3.2

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.

Version 1.3.1

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

Version 1.3

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

Version 1.2.4

New features

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

Version 1.2.3

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

Version 1.2.2

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

Version 1.2.1

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

Version 1.2

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

Version 1.1

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

Version 1.0.1

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

Version 1.0

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