Significantly improve collaboration efficiency with the Adobe-level annotation features powered by the best free highlighting software PDFgear Desktop.
The PDFgear Desktop text highlighter tool delivers a colorful collaborating experience, while the most precise messages are emphasized and clearly conveyed.
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.
Aside from highlighting text and areas in PDFs, PDFgear Desktop provides a plethora of annotation options including annotations, comments, electronic signatures, shapes, etc.
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.
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.
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 |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simple clicks to highlight text and areas in PDF. Get PDFgear Desktop now.