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Highlights - PDF Viewer/Editor 4+
Read, Study & Markup Documents
Jonas Myren Ribe
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- Free
- Offers In-App Purchases
Screenshots
Description
The PDF reader optimized for research on Mac, iPad & iPhone. Turn your annotations into powerful notes and export them anywhere, so you can focus on the bigger picture.
"It’s the novel approach to PDF annotation that makes this app a cut above the rest"- TapSmart.com
"A simple and effective tool for helping you strip key information out of research PDFs." - iCreate Magazine, Issue 221
"... an app that students, academics, and anyone who does substantial amounts of PDF-based research should try" - Macstories.net
USE HIGHLIGHTS FOR FREE
Highlights is a fast and lightweight PDF reader (under 10MB) packed with features to help with your research.
Free users have access to standard PDF reader features including document browsing, reading and annotating. There are NO ADS, time limits or tracking.
READ PDF DOCUMENTS
• Open PDFs in Single Page or Two Page scroll mode
• Double-tap with two fingers to Smart Zoom in on a paragraph or figure
• Display PDFs in regular, sepia or night appearance
HIGHLIGHT AND ANNOTATE FASTER
• Annotate with fewer clicks using context aware popovers
• Highlight, underline, strikethrough text and make image selections
• Add comments to annotations or as individual sticky notes
• Default annotation colors prevents you from having to repeatedly setting the color for the same type of annotation every time
TURN ANNOTATIONS INTO NOTES
• As you markup text and images the contents are extracted and sorted into notes
• Customize the formatting and contents of your notes
• Sort the annotations chronologically or create your own color coding
EXTRACT TABLE DATA AND RECOGNIZE TEXT
• Convert images containing text or tables to actual text and tables using machine learning - letting you get to the underlying data with a single click
SMART COPY
Copy annotations to the desired format with one click:
• Text markup as text
• Image selections as images
• Tables as CSV
• Citations as BibTex
LOOKUP CITATIONS
• Highlights will fetch DOI-links and metadata
• Markup any reference and click the link icon to look it up
• If you have read the work already or have it in your reference manager library, Highlights will link you to it
EXPORT ANYWHERE
• Save or share your notes as portable files: Markdown, TextBundle, HTML, WebArchive or PDF
• Share them to your favorite notes app: Apple Notes, Bear, Craft, Evernote, DEVONThink, Keep It, MindNode, Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research or Ulysses
• Or send them to a colleague via mail. It's your notes, you decide where they go
• Customize the contents of your notes using templates
MUCH MORE
• Night and Sepia PDF appearances
• Automatically save notes as a sidecar Markdown file
• Multi-lingual text recognition
• Default annotation colors
• Integration with reference managers like Paper and Bookends
• Integration with DEVONthink
For a full list of features see: highlightsapp.net/features
HIGHLIGHTS PRO
The Highlights Pro subscription unlocks advanced features on your iPhone, iPad and Mac:
• Export options for other apps and easily editable formats
• Extract information using table and text recognition
• Customize accent colors and alternative app icons
• Power annotation tools
• Citation lookups
• Smart Copy
Highlights Pro includes a 14-day free trial. You can cancel your subscription at any time. The subscription will automatically renew unless auto-renew is turned off within 24-hour prior to the end of of the current period.
Payments will be charged to your iTunes account and your account will be charged within 24-hours prior to the end of the current period. Any unused portion of a free trial period will be forfeited when you purchase a subscription.
For more information about Highlights Pro: highlightsapp.net/pro
Privacy Policy and Terms: highlightsapp.net/privacy
What’s New
Version 2023.2.10
Speed + Sonoma! Highlights runs smoothly on macOS 14 Sonoma already, but this update brings some major performance 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:
- Smoother resizing of image selections
- Existing image selections will no longer keep the previous aspect ratio when resized
- Image selections from rotated pages now grab the expected area
- Fixed an issue with Pro features potentially not being recognized on first parse
- Fixed an issue that could prevent images from appearing in notes
- Fixed an issue that could cause inactive page links
- Improved thread safety
- Fixed a memory leak
- Fixed a potential crash on launch
- Fixed a crash related to tracking of user setting updates
- Remove null characters if present in the text of markup annotations
- Improved Smart Copy when getting text of markup annotations
- Improved handling of highlights:// links
Ratings and Reviews
Good, but with needed improvements
It's a good tool for highligjhting.
One of the weaknesses is that highlights which have a note should be displayed differently, so that you see there is a written note there.
Acessability is lacking: It should be possible to configure the interface and change the fonts in the notes panel. It shoul be possible to choose the font and size (key for someone who needs more visible fonts).
Preferred tool for taking note and reviewing papers
Let me say I have tried every pdf tool around, no exception. I bought many of them to see the full features. This one is my currently preferred tool for reviewing papers.
It’s far from perfect, though, and it has some annoying points missing, specially two:
(i) it’s not possible to edit a note on the right section of the screen, or jump to the note in the pdf when selecting it. Finding the note on the page is cumbersome.
(ii) it’s not possible to use a pen to make annotations, writing by hand, or arrows.
Also, it’s not possible to adjust the border between the pdf and the notes when side by side.
The search feature is a bit too basic. Also, the zoom on the iPad works fine but on a mac needs to improve.
Having said that, this tool is a must. I have combined its use along with pdfexpert and marginnote.
Would be helpful but...
I was pretty excited when I first discovered this app, it’s a simple tool which initially was super helpful for me studying medicine. However I have recently noticed some bugs which can result in any highlighting I have done on a document suddenly disappearing as if it never happened when I next open the app.
This is unacceptable and needs resolving ASAP.
iPad Pro 12.9, iPadOS 13.6
Developer Response ,
Thank you for the feedback! We apologize for the bad experience, but this bug should now be resolved (2020.2) and only affected a small subset of PDFs.
Subscriptions
App Privacy
The developer, Jonas Myren Ribe, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer's privacy policy.
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Jonas Myren Ribe
- Size
- 8.4 MB
- Category
- Productivity
- Compatibility
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- iPhone
- Requires iOS 13.4 or later.
- iPad
- Requires iPadOS 13.4 or later.
- iPod touch
- Requires iOS 13.4 or later.
- Mac
- Requires macOS 10.15 or later.
- Apple Vision
- Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- Languages
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English
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2023 Jonas Ribe
- Price
- Free
- In-App Purchases
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- Highlights Pro $39.99
- Highlights Pro: Monthly $5.99
- Highlights Pro: Legacy Upgrade $39.99
Supports
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Family Sharing
Some in‑app purchases, including subscriptions, may be shareable with your family group when Family Sharing is enabled.