4 minute read | Last update: November 25, 2025
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Table of Contents
▼The great thing about PDFs is that they allow you to work with them in a variety of ways. They’re versatile and user-friendly, and with the right tools, you can use them similarly to how you would use a paper document.
For example, imagine you’re reading something and you want to highlight a passage to bring up at a later time. With a PDF, it’s not only possible, but it’s easy. In this post, we’ll walk you through the steps for highlighting a PDF.
How to Highlight a PDF Document with PDFinity
We know that you don’t want to spend a lot of time fiddling around with tools, so we’ve made it easy to highlight passages in a PDF. Almost as easy as using a marker on paper, but not quite.
Here’s what you need to do to highlight a PDF in PDFinity:
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Upload: The first step is to go to our PDF Annotator and upload the file you wish to work on.
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Select: Next, choose the highlight feature in the Annotator.
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Highlight: Select the passages you want to highlight and highlight them.
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Save: Save the file and download it so you can use it as you need.
How to Highlight a PDF on Mac
Mac users can use PDFinity to highlight PDFs, but they can also use Preview, the built-in PDF editor that comes with their operating system. Using Preview is easy:
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Select file: Choose the file you’re working with and either open the file or right-click and select Open with Preview.
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Markup: Select the “Markup Toolbar” Icon, the pen tip in a circle, or press Shift + Command + A.
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Choose: Pick the highlight button from the list of options and pick your color.
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Highlight: Drag the mouse over the desired text and save when you’re finished.
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BONUS TIP: You can also press Command + Control + H to access the highlight tool.
How to Highlight a PDF File on Windows
Windows users also have the ability to highlight documents in PDF using the Microsoft Edge browser. Like the other platforms, it’s a pretty straightforward process:
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Open: Open the file you want to work with, either by double-clicking on the file or right-clicking and selecting “Open” with Edge.
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Draw: Find the “Draw” tab on the toolbar at the top. This will lead you to the “Annotations” toolbar.
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Choose: Pick the highlighting tool from the annotations toolbar and pick the color you want to work with.
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Highlight: Drag the cursor over the text to highlight it. When you’re done, choose “Save”.
Why Should You Consider Highlighting Text in Your PDFs?
There are a lot of reasons why you’d want to highlight text in a PDF. Most of them are similar to why you’d highlight a physical document.
It’s a great way to share specific parts of a PDF with someone without having to edit pages out. It’s also great for picking out important passages from a document when you’re studying or working on something like a presentation.
You can easily find the passages again when you’re ready to use them (or referring to them as you study).
FAQs About PDF Highlighting
Why can’t I highlight text in my PDF?
There are a couple of reasons that this could be happening. The first is that it's possible the PDF is protected. You'll either need to use the password to unlock it or use a reliable online tool (like PDFinity) to help you gain access. The other possibility is that you're working with a scanned document. If that's the case, you'll first need to use Optical Character Recognition to convert the image to text.
How to Change Highlight Color in PDF?
When you choose the highlighter in the Annotator Tool, there are a number of preset colors that you can choose from. If you don't see your preferred color in the provided options, you can use the color palette to find a custom color that suits your needs.
How to Add Comments to a Highlighted Text?
Inside the tool, you'll find a button labeled "Sticky". This lets you create a digital sticky note that you can use to add comments to the highlighted text. You can choose the color and type of stick note that you want, and add the comments you need to fully annotate the highlighted section.
More Tools Besides PDF Highlighting
If you’re looking to do more with PDFs, we’ve got a full suite of tools that can help you work with this wonderful file type. Here are just a few of the things you can do.
- Split files: You can easily cut out pages from a PDF to save as a separate file.
- Merge PDFs: Combine multiple PDFs into a single document to keep all the information you need in one place.
- Organize PDF: Not happy with the way a file is looking? Our tool lets you make any changes you may want without having to go back to the source file.
- Add an image to a PDF: You can add an image to a PDF in a few clicks with this tool.
- PDF Converter: If your file comes from another format or you need to convert your PDF to a different one, this is the tool you need.
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