Highlights: PDF Reader & Notes 4+
Edit Research Documents/Books
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 2022.1
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
Ratings and Reviews
Just downloaded this app
I use this for online school but I do have to save the web pages (lessons) as PDFs in order to use this app, which is not a big deal bc iOS makes it so simple. After using it for a couple of hours, I can already say, the free version is soooo good, I’m bout ready to buy the pro version. Well done. PLEASE keep up the good work. All I would change is that when you want to add a comment, it should just show the input box instead of having to click “add comment” and THEN the input box shows up. Also more color options for highlighting.
I was using Weava before this, and between that app and this one, this one takes the cake. Awesome. I just wish they would add more color options like Weava. I’m bouncing between both apps because I love that I can choose whatever color I want on Weava.
I want to like this but I don’t
I really like the highlighting capabilities, when they work that is. Plain highlighting usually works ok, but little details have bugs. Like, say I have a highlight that spans multiple pages. Half the time, that doesn’t work, and some strange area vaguely related to what I selected ends up being highlighted. So I have to delete the highlight and try again. Usually I end up making two separate highlights. Or, say I select some text and I end up missing a word or two, so I want to expand the selection. Good luck getting that to work. It’s easier to delete the selection and try again. And again. But I could deal with little nits lick that if only the app could remember what location I’ve read up to in the document. I don’t know how many times I’ve read 10 or 20 pages of a document, then come back the next day, and the app places me on page one again, and I have to figure out where I left off. Then I read another 10 or 20 pages, come back the next day, and the app puts me on page one again. So, I wrote to the developer to ask for help with that. No response. Nothing. I like the idea, but this app doesn’t feel complete. I see the other reviews and I wonder how they aren’t seeing the same problems I am.
More colors and connectivity across devices than you think
I incidentally found out that I have more color options by re-highlighting different colors over each other. Makes my notes much prettier. In addition, I was on the go once with only my phone, not my tablet. I was easily able to sync up to my tablets progress and pick up where I left off since I saved it to the iCloud. Thank goodness for this feature! Saves me time and gives me relief to be able to use this app to keep track of all my research articles for school. Now if I can only figure out how to use some type of subfolders to organize everything even more…
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
- 7.3 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.
- Languages
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English
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2022 Jonas Ribe
- Price
- Free
- In-App Purchases
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- Highlights Pro: Monthly $2.99
- Highlights Pro $24.99
- Highlights Pro: Legacy Upgrade $24.99
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.