Highlights: PDF Reader & Notes

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.

This app has ALMOST everything that would make it a replacement for PDF Expert (my current workhourse) or other annoation apps. As a Professor and director of a biomed research lab, my primary workflow involves downloading, annotating, and sharing PDFs with my team of 20 scientists. The Mac version is especially good on an M1 machine. Moreover, I find the text and image extraction capabilities to be excellent and so useful, as is the doi citation matching. Together with ReadCubePapers, the two apps are an ulitmate combination for managment of the large volume of publications I read or wish to file. What is missing? 1) The ability to scribble or freehand annoatate - especially on iPad. Really, it is a fatal flaw for me that has long been "planned" but implementation is needed soon, or my Pro subscription to Highlights will expire for good. 2) on iPad, he interaction with Apple Pencil also needs slight improvement with highlighting, as it awkwardly pauses just a second too long before reacting/responding; this leads to errors and then requires me to often try to highight multiple times unless I am VERY slow and careful when selecting text (and errors show in the Notes pane). 3) the ability to edit extracted notes to fix error in real time would be helpful and perhaps a means to have multiple levels of saved/save as notes after editing would be possible? 4) More and lighter color choices for highlighing, and darker (or just black/dark grey for underlining. The color matching schemes and palattes available are limiting and there should be a way to have a color picker integrated as an optional "spot" to be assigned a task or two. Otherwise, Highlights is a real beautiful and useful pp with much going for it...and I *want* to keep paying for it...time will tell, but I am optimistic! I will return to update my review to 5 stars if some of these things are implemented before the next academic year.

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.