3 Free and Easy Methods to Highlight Text in PDF on Mac

Excerpt: This page covers 3 easy solutions to highlighting text in PDF documents on Mac devices. The methods are all completely free so don’t hesitate to give them a try!

It’s usually hard to get the point of a business or academic document as they are full of texts. Highlighting a PDF document is a practical way to make certain lines of text more distinguishable, make your points and insights stick out, and make your remote collaboration much easier and more efficient.

Today in the modern age, highlighting and annotation text in documents are much handier than before. In this post, we’ll talk about how to highlight a PDF on Mac for free, online and offline methods will both be introduced.

It’s worth mentioning that, these methods only work for editable PDF documents, if you intend to highlight text in scanned documents, please check out the FAQs section at the bottom of this post.

How to Highlight Text in PDF on Mac Online Using PDFgear

Nothing beats an online application in terms of handiness and convenience, as long as you’re connected to the internet. If you intend to highlight text in your small PDF documents on Mac real quick, then you definitely should check out PDFgear.

PDFgear is an all-in-one online PDF management toolkit for a variety of purposes including PDF conversion, PDF compression, PDF annotation, PDF markup, etc.

PDFgear offers a practical PDF highlighter that allows you to highlight text in PDF online, using customizable colors.

Now learn how you can highlight text in PDF in 3 simple steps using PDFgear.

Step 1. Upload PDF to PDFgear Online Highlighter

Use a web browser application on your Mac to navigate to PDFgear Online PDF Highlighter, then drag and drop your file or click the Add files button to import your PDF.

Import PDF to PDFgear PDF Highlighter

Step 2. Highlight Text

Select the desired texts, right-click on them, and hit Highlight. Then go to the Change Color option above to define the highlighting colors. You can use HEX to pick colors, and RGB and HSC are also available for adjustments.

Highlight Text in Document on Mac Using PDFgear

Step 3. Get the Highlighted PDF Document

When you’re ready, hit the corresponding buttons from the upper-right side to print or download the highlighted PDF, so you can easily share or save the highlighted document file.

Get the Highlighted PDF from PDFgear

How to Highlight a PDF on Mac Offline Using PDFgear Desktop

In many cases, we need to highlight our documents yet we do not have access to a stable internet connection, then what we need is a piece of PDF highlighter software for Mac, which helps markup text in PDF offline, and it’s especially suitable for large PDF documents.

The most reliable option for the job is PDFgear Desktop, a fairly versatile PDF highlighter for Mac and Windows, and it does a whole lot more than the PDFgear online highlighter, which makes it worth the installation.

Now follow the tutorial below to highlight on a PDF on Mac offline using PDFgear Desktop.

Prerequisite: To get started, you need PDFgear Desktop installed on your Mac device. Free download PDFgear from PDFgear’s official website: https://pdfgear.com/, and then install it on your Mac computer.

Step 1. Launch PDFgear Desktop, and hit the Open File button above to open the PDF document you intend to highlight on Mac.

Step 2. Select the text you intend to highlight, hit highlight from the pop-pop dropdown menu, and choose a favored color.

Step 3. You can also hit the upper-right Highlight button to customize the desired color more precisely.

Step 4. When ready, hit the upper-left Save button from the menubar to save the highlighted PDF document on Mac.

Highlight in PDF on Mac Offline Using PDFgear Desktop

How to Highlight in PDF on Mac Using Preview App

Aside from the PDFgear Desktop PDF Highlighter, there is also an offline method that is installation free. There’s an inbuilt PDF reader app called Preview on your Mac that can serve as a practical PDF highlighter.

With the Preview app, you can easily highlight text in your documents without an internet connection.

Learn from the steps below on how to highlight PDF on Mac offline using the Preview app.

Step 1. Launch the Preview app, and go to File to open the PDF.
Step 2. Select to highlight the desired text with your mouse.
Step 3. Click the upper Highlighter button to highlight selected text with color in Preview.
Step 4. You can change the highlighting color by clicking the arrow beside the Highlighter button.
Step 5. When it’s done, go to the upper-left File tab to save and export your highlighted PDF from the Preview app.

Highlight PDF on Mac with Preview App

To Sum Up

There are three practical methods introduced in the post, which respectively are using the PDFgear website, using PDFgear Desktop, and using the Mac Preview app. All of them are easy to get started.

Since we’re here now, I believe that you have benefited from this guide and acquired the fitting methods for you to highlight your PDF documents correctly. I hope this page is helpful to you and your business efficiency is improved.

What are your opinions on highlighting PDF texts on Mac? It’s now your turn, please share your insights!

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