PDFgear Desktop

Instantly highlight PDF text and areas

  • Text and area highlighting supported
  • Select to highlight desired texts or areas
  • Ample color themes in the color blender
  • Highlight, annotate, and sign PDF in one place
PDFgear Highlight PDF Banner

Enjoyable Highlighting for Remote Work

Significantly improve collaboration efficiency with the Adobe-level annotation features powered by the best free highlighting software PDFgear Desktop.

Facilitate Collaborations

The PDFgear Desktop text highlighter tool delivers a colorful collaborating experience, while the most precise messages are emphasized and clearly conveyed.

PDFgear Highlight PDF Feature 1
Highlight Text and Areas

In PDFgear Desktop, two highlighting options are offered for you to flexibly highlight your PDF documents: select and highlight text in PDF, or select and highlight areas in PDF.

PDFgear Highlight PDF Feature 2
Highlighting and More

Aside from highlighting text and areas in PDFs, PDFgear Desktop provides a plethora of annotation options including annotations, comments, electronic signatures, shapes, etc.

PDFgear Highlight PDF Feature 3
Highlight Scanned PDFs

Highlighting words and sentences in PDF requires you to select text in the document. PDFgear Desktop highlighter is also packed with a powerful OCR tool to make your PDF selectable.

PDFgear Highlight PDF Feature 4
How to Highlight PDF Documents with PDFgear Desktop

Launch PDFgear Desktop on your computer, and click the Open File button to import the PDF you intend to highlight.

From the PDF preview screen, click the Annotate option from the upper menubar, and you’ll find two highlighting options: Highlight and Area Highlight.

With Highlight and Area Highlight, you can respectively highlight text in PDF or highlight areas in PDF. When it’s done, hit the upper-left Save button to save the highlighted PDF.

How to Highlight PDF with PDFgear Desktop Step 1 How to Highlight PDF with PDFgear Desktop Step 2 How to Highlight PDF with PDFgear Desktop Step 3
Much More about PDFgear Desktop

Tech Specs

Point For Windows For MacOS
Supported OS Windows 10 and Windows 11 macOS 10.14 to macOS 13, Apple M1
RAM 512 MB of memory (RAM), 1 GB recommended
Disk 500M of free hard disk space 200M of free hard disk space
Internet Internet connection is necessary for Product Activation, Product Help, and Live Updates.
Supported File Formats .pdf(PDF, PDF/A), .docx, .doc, .pptx, .ppt, .xlsx, .xls, .xml, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .bmp, .gif, .tiff, .txt, .epub, .rtf, .html, .hwp, .hwpx .pdf, .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, .jpg, .png, .gif, .tiff, .epub, .html, .rtf, .txt
System Language Chinese Simplified, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish
OCR Language Support Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish

Frequently Asked Questions

Why can’t I highlight my PDF?

There are two more probably cases where you can’t highlight your PDF. One is that your PDF document is protected, which means you need to unlock the PDF. And another reason is that the PDF is a scanned document that is unselectable, so you need to use PDF OCR before the highlighting.

Can I change the highlight color?

In the PDFgear Desktop highlighter tool, you can find 60+ color themes to use as the highlighting color or change the existing highlight color to. And aside from the color presets, you can also use the color palette to choose a custom color.

How to change the highlight color in PDF?

To change the existing highlighting color in PDFgear, open the PDF document that you previously highlighted in PDFgear Desktop. From the PDF preview screen, click on the selected highlight text, and choose another color from the upper color schemes.

How to remove highlights in PDF?

To remove the existing highlight color in PDFgear, open the PDF document you highlighted in PDFgear Desktop, select the highlight, right-click on select the highlight, and hit the remove button that pops up.

How to highlight PDFs on Mac?

To highlight PDFs on Mac, open the PDF with Preview. Click on the Highlight button that looks like a drawing crayon, and the highlight colors will be found from the down arrow button. Moreover, for professional users with advanced annotation requirements, you are also suggested to try the free PDF annotator software PDFgear Desktop.

How do I highlight in PDF on mobile phones?

To highlight a PDF document on iPhone and Android phones, the easiest method is using the PDFgear online PDF highlighter. You can easily find flexible highlighting options from the upper menubar.

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Highlighting PDF made easy

Simple clicks to highlight text and areas in PDF. Get PDFgear Desktop now.

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