How to Highlight on a Mac: Preview, Pages, Notes and Safari, Step by Step

Learning how to highlight on a Mac means learning four tools, not one. Preview highlights PDFs, Pages has a review highlight and a separate color behind text, Notes has its own highlighter, and Safari can mark a passage on a web page and keep it there for your next visit. Each saves its marks in a different place, and the Pages review highlight does not print. This guide gives the steps for each one, taken from Apple's own user guides, plus how to remove a highlight, how to find your highlights again, and a short worked example of marking one reading across all four apps.

How to highlight on a Mac: which app for which job

Start with the kind of file in front of you. The table below is the short version; the sections after it give the exact steps.

How to highlight a PDF in Preview

In Preview, pick the color once and every selection becomes a highlight.

Preview is the Mac's built-in PDF reader, and its highlighter marks the PDF itself. Apple's Preview guide to highlighting, underlining and striking out text gives two ways to work: a quick one for a single passage, and a highlight mode for marking many passages in a row.

1. Open the PDF in Preview

   Double-click the file, or open Preview and choose the PDF. The highlighter works on text you can select.

2. Highlight one passage

   Select the text, click the down arrow next to the Highlight button in the toolbar, then choose a highlight color, underline or strikethrough.

3. Or turn on highlight mode

   Click the Highlight button so it turns gray, then pick a color from the arrow beside it. Now every selection you make is highlighted at once. Click the button again to stop.

4. Remove a mark

   Control-click the highlighted text and choose Remove from the shortcut menu. Apple's wording names the item, so it reads Remove Highlight, Remove Underline and so on.

5. See every highlight

   Choose View > Highlights and Notes. Each highlighted passage appears in the sidebar, which makes a quick table of contents of what you marked.

Preview's other markup tools, notes, text boxes and shapes, sit in the Markup toolbar. They are covered in the guide to annotating a PDF for free, and the PDF-specific tricks for other readers are in the walkthrough for highlighting text in a PDF.

How to highlight text in Pages

Pages has two highlighters, and mixing them up is the most common confusion. Apple's Pages guide to highlighting and commenting describes the review highlight: a temporary mark for calling out parts of a document while you review it. Apple says these highlights are not visible in printed documents, and that when several people work on a document, each person's highlights appear in a unique color.

Review highlight (does not print)

1. Select the text.
2. Press Shift-Command-H, or choose Insert > Highlight from the menu bar at the top of the screen. Apple notes that the Insert button on the Pages toolbar does not have the Highlight command; use the menu bar.
3. To attach a note, move the pointer over the highlight, click Add a comment, type, then click Done.
4. To remove it, move the pointer over the highlight and click Delete. To clear every highlight and comment from the body text, press Command-A, then choose Edit > Remove Highlights and Comments.

Apple adds two limits: you cannot highlight text in table cells this way, and Remove Highlights and Comments does not touch text boxes, shapes or tables.

Text background (prints)

If the color must survive printing or export, use a background color instead. The same Apple page points to it: select the text, open the Format sidebar, click Style, click the Advanced Options button in the Font section, then pick a color next to Text Background. If you point at a highlight and no Delete button appears, Apple explains, the color was added as a background and has to be removed as a background color.

How to highlight in Notes

Notes gained a highlighter of its own. Apple's guide to formatting notes on Mac gives the steps: select some text, click the Format button, then click the Highlight button. To change the color, click the colored circle next to the Highlight button and choose another one. Apple says all the Notes features in its guide are available with iCloud notes and that some are not available with accounts from other providers, so if the button is missing, check which account the note lives in.

Notes is a good place for highlights you want to sort by color. A fixed scheme, such as yellow for claims and green for evidence, is set out in the color-code system for study highlights.

How to highlight a web page in Safari

In Safari, highlighting runs through Quick Note. Apple's Quick Note guide says you can highlight text in a web page and add it straight to a Quick Note:

1. Select the passage in Safari

   Drag across the words you want to keep.

2. Control-click and choose Add to Quick Note

   A link appears in the Quick Note, and the text in Safari is highlighted.

3. Come back later

   Apple says that when you visit the page again, the text is still highlighted, and a thumbnail of the Quick Note appears in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

4. Remove the highlight

   Delete the Safari link from the Quick Note. That is how Apple says to clear it.

Quick Notes are filed in the Quick Notes folder in Notes. To open one from anywhere, Apple gives the shortcut: hold the Fn or Globe key and press Q. The highlight belongs to your Quick Note, not to the page, so other visitors do not see it. To send someone straight to a sentence, use a link that ends in #:~:text= instead; the highlight link generator builds one, and the explainer on text fragment links covers how they behave.

Selecting text with the keyboard first

Every highlighter above starts with a selection. Hold Shift and press the arrow keys to extend a selection one character or one line at a time, and press Command-A to select everything. The fuller list, including word and paragraph jumps, is in the keyboard shortcuts for selecting text.

A worked example: one reading, four apps

Suppose you are preparing a short history assignment. The example below is a plan, not a record of anyone's session; it shows which app fits each job.

• The assigned PDF. Open it in Preview, turn on highlight mode with yellow, and mark the three sentences the essay will argue with. View > Highlights and Notes now lists them in the sidebar.
• A web source. In Safari, select the one paragraph that supports your second point, Control-click and choose Add to Quick Note. Type the date and one line on why it matters into the note.
• Your outline in Notes. Paste the three Preview sentences in, then highlight claims in yellow and evidence in green with the Format button.
• The draft in Pages. When a classmate reviews it, they press Shift-Command-H on the two sentences they doubt and add a comment. Their highlights do not print, so the copy you hand in is clean.

Pitfalls when highlighting on a Mac

• Using the Pages toolbar's Insert button. It has no Highlight command. Use the Insert menu in the menu bar or Shift-Command-H.
• Expecting review highlights to print. Apple says Pages review highlights are not visible in printed documents. Use Text Background for marks that must show.
• Trying to highlight a page you cannot select. Preview's highlighter marks selected text, so a page whose words will not select needs the other markup tools covered in the PDF annotation guide.
• Forgetting where a Safari highlight is stored. It is tied to the Quick Note. Delete the note's link and the highlight goes with it.

Tips for cleaner Mac highlights

• Use highlight mode for long sessions. In Preview it turns every selection into a mark, so you never reach for the toolbar.
• Highlight less than you think. A sentence per paragraph is plenty. Whole pages of yellow tell you nothing later, a point made at length in the evidence on whether highlighting helps you learn.

On a Mac you may also be marking up a design or a sheet: highlight text in Canva or highlight cells in Excel.

Highlighting on a Mac comes down to picking the right app: Preview for PDFs, Pages for documents, with a choice between review and printed color, Notes for your own notes, and Safari with Quick Note for the web. Select the exact words, apply the app's highlight, and know where the mark is saved. For other devices and file types, the full set of highlighting and annotation guides covers phones, PDFs and the browser.