Highlights: PDF Reader & Notes
Research: Extract，Edit，Export
Free · In-App Purchases
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
more A whole new dark appearance for PDFs with smart content handling: text and backgrounds are changed while images and annotations are left untouched. This can reduce eye strain and improve readability in dark environments while conserving battery life. 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. No more glaring white pages in Dark Mode!
The new dark appearance for PDFs requires macOS 26.
Minor improvements:
- Added back the legacy dark PDF appearance with inverted colors on macOS 26 as "Inverted"
- Presenting the thumbnail sidebar in full screen by moving the mouse to the left edge no longer crashes the app on macOS 26
- 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
2026.1.1 18 Mar
A whole new dark appearance for PDFs with smart content handling: text and backgrounds are changed while images and annotations are left untouched. This can reduce eye strain and improve readability in dark environments while conserving battery life. 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. No more glaring white pages in Dark Mode!
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
2026.1 28 Jan
Liquid Glass design on macOS 26 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.
Minor improvements:
- Fixed an issue preventing certain types of internal links and URL-schemes in comments from working
- Fixed centering of tables in notes
- Fix for pdfView backgroundColor appearing light grey in Night appearance in Dark Mode on macOS 26
- Fixed a crash related to grabbing image selections on first parse
2025.1.2 23/10/2025
Liquid Glass design on macOS 26 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.
Minor improvements:
- Fixed centering of tables in notes
- Fix for pdfView backgroundColor appearing light grey in Night appearance in Dark Mode on macOS 26
- Fixed a crash related to grabbing image selections on first parse
2025.1.1 24/09/2025
Liquid Glass design on macOS 26 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.
Minor improvement:
- Fixed a crash related to grabbing image selections on first parse
2025.1 15/09/2025
Ready for macOS 15 Sequoia! This release improves text recognition in images and tables with automatic language detection and support for more languages.
The new languages are: Cantonese (China mainland), Cantonese (Hong Kong), Korean, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabic (Modern Standard), Arabic (Najdi)
Automatic language detection requires macOS 13 . Thai and Vietnamese requires macOS 14 Sonoma. Arabic requires macOS 15 Sequoia. All languages also work with OCR when scanning documents on iOS/iPadOS 18.
Minor improvement:
- Print dialog now includes the page range
2024.1 22/09/2024
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
2023.2.10 20/11/2023
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
- 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
2023.2.9 17/11/2023
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:
- 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
2023.2.8 27/10/2023
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:
- 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
2023.2.7 25/10/2023
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:
- 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
2023.2.6 23/10/2023
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:
- 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
2023.2.5 22/10/2023
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:
- 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
2023.2.4 19/10/2023
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:
- 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
2023.2.3 18/10/2023
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:
- 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
2023.2.2 16/10/2023
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:
- Fixed a potential crash on launch on macOS 11 and earlier
- 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
2023.2.1 14/10/2023
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:
- 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
2023.2 11/10/2023
Introducing Smart OCR! Select text in PDFs without a text layer on the fly using Live Text and Highlights will embed it as OCR automatically in the background. Similarly, non-searchable PDFs will become searchable as you search and everything is done locally without you having to initiate it. Smart!
These features require macOS 13 Ventura or later. Smart OCR works with English, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian text on hardware that supports Live Text.
Minor improvements:
- Resolved a longstanding bug with network error messages popping up for a small set of users when opening files
- 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
- Added a setting for Pro users to never be prompted for metadata fetches (General > Fetch Metadata > "Manual")
- Fixed a bug introduced in 2023.1.1 where Pro users enabling the "Save Sidecar Markdown-file"-setting would get a blank Preference panel
2023.1.2 17/09/2023
Introducing Smart OCR! Select text in PDFs without a text layer on the fly using Live Text and Highlights will embed it as OCR automatically in the background. Similarly, non-searchable PDFs will become searchable as you search and everything is done locally without you having to initiate it. Smart!
These features require macOS 13 Ventura or later. Smart OCR works with English, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian text on hardware that supports Live Text.
Minor improvements:
- Resolved a longstanding bug with network error messages popping up for a small set of users when opening files
- 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
- Added a setting for Pro users to never be prompted for metadata fetches (General > Fetch Metadata > "Manual")
2023.1.1 04/09/2023
Introducing Smart OCR! Select text in PDFs without a text layer on the fly using Live Text and Highlights will embed it as OCR automatically in the background. Similarly, non-searchable PDFs will become searchable as you search and everything is done locally without you having to initiate it. Smart!
These features require macOS 13 Ventura or later. Smart OCR works with English, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian text on hardware that supports Live Text.
Minor improvement:
- Resolved a longstanding bug with network error messages popping up for a small set of users when opening files
2023.1 22/08/2023
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 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
Minor improvements:
- The background color behind the PDF when using night appearance is now black (no longer inverted)
- Preferences has been renamed to Settings on the latest release of macOS (Ventura)
- Fixed an issue where some toolbar buttons would appear too narrow
- Fixed an issue with receipt validation related to AirPlay speakers
- 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
- Fixes 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
2022.1 02/12/2022
Lots of new tutorials! (Help > Tutorials)
And much more:
- New default orange accent color
- Updated export icons for Ulysses, Bear, DEVONthink and Keep It
- #hashtags in annotation comments are now recognized as inline tags and display as such in your notes
- Exporting to DEVONthink as a folder of snippets (Split files) applies the #hashtags as file tags to the corresponding annotation file
- 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~~
Minor improvements:
- Improved DOI-link recognition (incl. PNAS, The Lancet)
- 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
2021.1.1 05/03/2021
Lots of new tutorials! (Help > Tutorials)
And much more:
- New default orange accent color
- Updated export icons for Ulysses, Bear, DEVONthink and Keep It
- #hashtags in annotation comments are now recognized as inline tags and display as such in your notes
- Exporting to DEVONthink as a folder of snippets (Split files) applies the #hashtags as file tags to the corresponding annotation file
- 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~~
Minor improvements:
- Improved DOI-link recognition (incl. PNAS, The Lancet)
- 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
2021.1 01/03/2021
A fresh new look for the future of macOS:
• New app icon!
• 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 the upcoming macOS release
• Cleaner menubar with PDF navigation features in a separate Go-menu
New features:
• 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
2020.3 12/11/2020
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
2020.2 18/09/2020
A whole new dark appearance for PDFs with smart content handling: text and backgrounds are changed while images and annotations are left untouched. This can reduce eye strain and improve readability in dark environments while conserving battery life. 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. No more glaring white pages in Dark Mode!
The new dark appearance for PDFs requires macOS 26.
Minor improvements:
- Added back the legacy dark PDF appearance with inverted colors on macOS 26 as "Inverted"
- Presenting the thumbnail sidebar in full screen by moving the mouse to the left edge no longer crashes the app on macOS 26
- 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
more Version 2026.1.1 18 Mar
Data Not Collected The developer does not collect any data from this app.
