Highlight in Color

As you learned in The Selection Tools, you use the Highlight Text tool to select text and simultaneously apply the current highlight color. The current highlight color is both displayed in, and selectable from, the Highlight pop-up menu in the document window’s toolbar.

Here’s one way to highlight text:

1. Choose Tools > Highlight Text Tool.

2. In the document window toolbar, from the Highlight pop-up menu, choose a highlight color.

3. Select some text in the PDF.

The selected text takes on the chosen highlight color. Every additional selection you make with the Highlight Text tool applies the chosen highlight color.

However, you don’t need to use the Highlight Text tool to highlight text. Instead, you can use a keyboard shortcut. This is how I prefer to highlight text, because I don’t have to switch to the Highlight Text tool. To apply a highlight color to selected text, type ⌘-Option-Shift-a number from 1 to 7. You can see the highlighting keyboard shortcuts by choosing the Format > Highlight submenu, a portion of which is shown in Figure 34.

Remove a Highlight

Obviously, being able to remove highlights is important. Aside from aesthetic considerations, when a page has too many highlights it’s hard to know which highlights are really important. Besides, even the best of us make mistakes and highlight a passage in error.

Here’s how to remove a highlight:

1. With the Select Text tool, select any portion of the highlighted text you want to remove. You don’t have to select the entire highlighted passage; any portion will do.

2. From the Highlight pop-up menu in the toolbar, choose Remove.

The entire highlight is removed.

Set a Custom Highlight Color

If the four standard highlight colors don’t appeal to you, you can specify as many as three custom highlight colors. These colors are set in the PDFpen Editing preferences and, once set, are available in all documents you subsequently open. As with any other highlight color, when you set a custom highlight color it remains the default highlight color until you select a different highlight color.

Here’s how to set a custom highlight color:

1. Choose PDFpen > Preferences > Editing.

2. Near the bottom of the Editing pane, click one of the Custom Highlight Color swatches.

3. In the Colors panel that appears, select a color.

PDFpen applies a 40% opacity to the chosen color, regardless of the Opacity slider setting in the Colors panel.

Find and Highlight

PDFpen provides the Edit > Find > Find and Highlight command (⌘-Option-Shift-F) for those cases where what you want to highlight can be boiled down to an exact word or phrase (Figure 35).

With this command, you can highlight individual occurrences of found text, highlight all occurrences of that text, or just find the text without highlighting. You can choose the highlight color from the four standard and three custom colors in the Highlight search window.

Underline Passages

If the seven different highlight colors aren’t enough to suit your needs, you can also mark text with various kinds of lines, although these are usually used for copy-edit purposes (read Copyedit and Review a PDF).

Like highlight colors, the line highlights are available from the toolbar’s Highlight pop-up menu. The three types of highlight lines are shown in Figure 36.

Here are the three kinds of line highlights available to you:

• Underline: This is a simple text underline. If the PDF already contains underlined text (using underlines to indicate italics is a standard manuscript convention), you probably want to avoid using it. Otherwise, an underline serves as a subtle highlight that’s not as obvious as a colored highlight. You can underline selected text by typing ⌘-Option-Shift-6.

• Strikethrough: This draws a line through, rather than under, the text. Strikethroughs are often used to mark passages for deletion, and are, therefore, not a very good choice for highlighting text. You can type ⌘-Option-Shift-7 to strike through selected text.

• Squiggle: This draws a wavy line under the selected text, and is useful for highlighting purposes, although the squiggle underline is often used to indicate passages that should be set in bold type. ⌘-Option-Shift-8 is the keyboard shortcut for applying a squiggle underline to selected text.

You can set the color of line highlights by selecting the Highlight Text tool and then choosing a text color with the Object Color Palette, as described in The Object Property Tools. The color you choose remains the default line highlight color until you change it.

Add Pop-Up Notes

Notes are useful for when you have a large amount of commentary to add: the note window can be closed to remove clutter, and opened by double-clicking the note icon with the Edit tool. When you reopen a note window, it retains the shape and position it had when you last closed it.

A note comes in two parts: a small, balloon-shaped icon that you can position on the page, and a note window with the contents of the note (Figure 37).

Notes are also useful when more than one person is commenting on the PDF. As you can see in Figure 37, above, the note window contains the name of the person who added it, and the date that the note was added. You can choose whether or not to show a name, and specify the name to use, in PDFpen’s Editing preferences.

To add a note to a page, do the following:

1. In the Editing Bar, click the leftmost icon in the tool-selection button, and then click the Note tool.

2. Click on the page where you want the icon to go.

   You can drag the icon wherever you like with the Edit tool.

3. In the note window, type your note (or paste it from the clipboard), and adjust the window’s size and location as desired.

4. Optionally, close the note window; if you need to reopen it, double-click the note icon.

To delete a note, click the trash button on the right side of the note’s title bar, or click the note icon to select it and press Delete.

Add Comment Boxes and Clouds

When you need to add short commentary that always remains visible on the page, add a comment box (Figure 38).

Comment boxes use the default font (set in PDFpen’s Editing preferences), and use the text color, stroke color, fill color, stroke style, and stroke width set in the Editing Bar’s object property tools (see The Object Property Tools), as demonstrated by the blue comment box shown in Figure 38, just previously.

To add a comment to a PDF page, do the following:

1. In the Editing Bar, click the markup tools segment of the tool-selection button, and then click the Comment tool.

2. Click on the page to add a comment box at the default size, or click and drag to create a comment box with a custom size and shape.

3. Select the text within the box (the default text is “Text”), and type your comment.

4. Optionally, choose the Edit tool, and reposition or resize the comment.

PDFpen provides an alternate shape for the comment frame: a cloud. Having the Cloud tool on the Editing Bar in addition to the Comment tool is convenient if you have two classes of comments (such as queries and suggestions) and want an easy way to make them visually distinct.

The steps for making a cloud comment are almost exactly the same as those for a comment box. The only difference is that you click the Cloud tool instead of the Comment tool in the steps listed above.

Cloud comments can have custom stroke widths, border colors, and fills just like comment boxes (Figure 39).

Record Audio Annotations

Perhaps you’re more of a verbal person and can say what you think better than you can write it. Or maybe you want to provide a recording of transcribed text in a PDF. Whatever your reason, you can provide listenable annotations with the Audio annotation tool in PDFpen.

To add an audio annotation to a PDF, do the following:

1. In the Editing Bar, click the markup tools segment of the tool-selection button, and then click the Audio annotation tool.

2. Click where you want to place the audio annotation.

3. In the dialog that appears (Figure 40), click the record button to begin recording your annotation.

   

4. Click the stop button to conclude the recording.

5. Optionally, click the play button to review your recording.

6. Click OK to save the annotation in the document.

As an alternative, you can click Select File in the recording dialog to attach a pre-recorded file as an audio annotation.

To play back an audio annotation, click the annotation marker in the PDF, and then click the play button that appears (Figure 41).

Print Notes and Comments

When you print a PDF, you have control over whether the notes and comments print. Figure 42 shows the relevant portion of PDFpen’s Print dialog; you may have to click Show Details in the dialog to see it.

Here’s what the options do; they are both unchecked by default:

• Print Comments: Select this to have the comments print in the exact location where you placed them on the page.

• Print Notes: Select this to have the note window contents print at the bottom of the page as numbered footnotes. PDFpen reduces the page size so that the notes fit, and it adds a note number to each note icon on the page.

Select, Copy, and Delete Annotations

As described in Navigate with Annotations, you can use the sidebar to see and move among a PDF’s annotations. You can also use the sidebar to select annotations: click to select a single annotation, Shift-click to select a contiguous range of annotations, and ⌘-click to select discontiguous annotations.

Once you have one or more annotations selected you can do the following:

• Delete: Choose Edit > Delete, or just press Delete, to remove the selected annotations from the PDF. Deleting multiple annotations at once is an easy way to clean up a previously marked-up PDF when the annotations it contains are no longer relevant to you. You might also use this capability when you make a duplicate of a marked-up PDF, such as one you have annotated for your own purposes, so that you can give that clean copy to someone else for review.

• Copy as text: Choose Edit > Copy As Text (⌘-C) to copy the text contained in the selected notes and comments, as well as the text of selected highlights, to the clipboard. Copying the text of multiple annotations is useful when one or more notes or comments contain substantive material that you may want to use elsewhere. For example, you can copy a reviewer’s comments and queries from the PDF so you can paste them into an email response to that reviewer. You could also highlight important passages in a PDF document and then copy the highlighted text to obtain a quick summary of the document’s main points.

View and Extract File Attachments

When a file attachment is placed as an annotation, it appears as a paperclip icon in the PDF (Figure 46). The person who produced the PDF may also pair the attachment annotation with a comment explaining what the attachment contains: that is considered a good practice, but is not mandatory. File annotations appear in the Annotations sidebar like any other annotation (View > Annotations); they also appear in PDFpen’s Attachments sidebar (View > Attachments).

When a PDF has file attachments that are not linked to a visible annotation, such attachments don’t appear in the Annotations sidebar but do appear in the Attachments sidebar (Figure 47). These attachments lack the paperclip icon.

To work with attachments, whether annotations or not, display the Attachments sidebar (View > Annotations), then Control-click the attachment and choose from the menu that appears (Figure 48).

You can also access these menu commands by selecting the attachment in the sidebar and clicking the action pop-up menu at the bottom of the sidebar. In either case, these are your choices:

• Preview: See what the attachment contains.

• Open: Open the attachment in the appropriate app on your Mac.

• Extract: Save the attachment as a separate file on your Mac.

Add and Delete File Attachments (Pro Feature)

With PDFpenPro, you can also add and delete file attachments.

To add a file attachment as an annotation, select the markup tools with the Editing Bar’s tool-selection button, choose the Attachment tool, and then click on the document page. A file dialog appears from which you can choose the file to attach.

To add a file attachment without displaying it as an annotation, choose Edit > Attachments > Add Attachment, and then select the file from the dialog that appears.

To delete a file attachment, Control-click it in the Attachments sidebar and then choose Delete Attachments; alternatively, you can select it in the sidebar and then choose Edit > Attachments > Remove.