Highlights: PDF Reader & Notes for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Asi Es Cierto

  Really good app

  UPDATE: I just learned some thing that makes this app even better. You can save PDFs in the cloud and then open them on the Windows and iPhone/iPad and highlight them. The highlights are saved across the platforms. This is one fantastic app. The app is fantastic. It is beautifully done and works really well. I am able to effortlessly do my research and this app speeds me along the way. One thing I wish it would do better is reflow the text to look better on the iPhone screen. Another point... If you need service. It may be a very long time before you get some. The developer will write and say that they are a one person operation. And while I respect their right to operate any way they want, the fee for the app is high enough that you would think that you would actually get faster response. When the developer responds, he is very polite and professional. And it makes me really happy I bought the app . I still rate it five stars because the bottom line is that’s what the app deserves. I get really tired of people taking stars away for various reasons that have nothing to do with how the app operates.

  
  
• By DrJJWMac

  Lacks essential export feature and has annoyances

  I had high hopes for this app to annotate PDFs collected as a background bibliography for review to prepare a science/engineering publication. But not in its current version. * Markdown export does not include the images. This eliminates my intent to use sophisticated, markdown-aware tools (e.g. Obsidian) to manage the exported annotation content. The lack of this ability alone leaves me with no greater power than my current go-to PDF editor app across PC and iPadOS. * There is no way to clear the (exhaustive) list of recent files on the iPadOS app. * As another review noted, you will end in the File Editor and can inadvertently delete a folder or file from some other app (this may be a problem for other iPadOS apps due solely to the poor control in the Files app itself and if so should raise a red flag that apps should only be able to READ in the File directory, not muck about in it fully). * After you highlight a text region, you will not easily be able to adjust it. Essentially, the best if not only viable way to short or lengthen the highlight is to delete it and remake it. On the plus side, Highlights appears to work well dynamically with other PDF-editing apps (e.g. Devonthink, Bookends), both on PC and iPadOS. Finally, I hope that a future update will allow a user to put tags on annotations (as possible in apps such as MarginNote or ZenReader).

  
  
• By Tripp88

  Pretty darn close

  Key feature that would make this near perfect: the ability to group highlights together. I'm studying med/surgery texts, so frequently highlight only short segments of sentences/paragraphs, rather than entire paragraphs. Would be awesome if I could group these together e.g. if a paragraph is describing a surgical technique, I could group the 2-3 highlights I made and add a group title with the name of the surgery. This is how my notes would ideally look if i was writing them out myself - will save significant time creating notes (especially going back over old highlights), which can then be exported and turned into flashcards e.g. with RemNotes. Liquidtext and Marginnotes kind of do this, but the output and user interface is bad and most of us don't need mind maps for everything. Draw/pen tool would also be cool but not as cool as the above feature.

  
  
• By Bride of Squid

  Love the idea; execution isn’t there

  I love the idea of this app; being able to easily pull out all my highlighted material from an article I’m reading into a separate file is a functionality I’ve been looking for for a while (LiquidText kind of does this, but I find the interface clunky and less useful than I had hoped). But too often the highlighting doesn’t work: I select text, and it randomly highlights the whole page (guessing superscripts are the problem, as someone else mentioned). Some of my highlights stick while others randomly disappear. I also dislike that I can’t write annotations in the margins—the whole advantage of the Microsoft Pencil for research is that I don’t have to use the keyboard when I’m reading to mark down quick notes in the margins. I would enthusiastically pay for this app if it did what it advertises reliably, and even more so if I could write marginalia; but in its present form it isn’t really useable.

  
  
• By BruceJiangcs

  life saver for researchers

  As a researcher, I have to read extensively for a number of topics; this means that I need a good tool to collect important points (argument, evidence, conclusion, future directions...). Before I used Highlights, I jotted down all the possiblly useful quotes on a notebook (traditional or electronic one). By so doing, i have felt more comfortable as i knew i kept the records of those significant points. However, it is illusionary, because i often forgot where I put those notes. Hightlights can a life-saver, because the hightlighted lines can be easily exported as a searchable pdf. Toegther with pdf search tools, notes and hightlighted quotes can be easily accessible, no matter how many pdfs I have on my computer.

  
  

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