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Highlight feature cannot reliably be undone in Preview app

I enjoy the Mac’s Preview app and use it often for my graphic design business. The annotation features especially are easy to use and much more accessible than in Adobe Acrobat. (For reasons I will never understand, Adobe hides annotation features. ???) Generally, Preview works rather well, but this evening it suddenly highlighted most of the text in a document my client sent me and the undo feature would not work. I had been working on annotating the PDF file, including highlights and text annotations for about 10 minutes before Preview ‘went rogue’ on me. I found the only way to get rid of (most) of the unwanted highlighting was to reselect every text block with the highlight tool. A very cumbersome process, and Preview left funny-looking highlights at the end of each text block, which makes my work look unprofessional. I’d be grateful for any ideas on how to keep this from happening in future.

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Jan 20, 2022 5:45 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 21, 2022 5:00 AM

In Preview, open the inspector (⌘i) and click the right-most tab in it. This will list all annotations that are in the PDF. Click each annotation that you want to remove and then backspace to remove them from the list. Then click on the document and those annotations will disappear.


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3 replies

Mar 1, 2022 3:23 PM in response to Cschiro

You can only apply highlights to one PDF at a time in Preview, regardless of whether the document location is on iCloud or the local drive. It does not spray highlights applied to one PDF across multiple opened PDFs in the same session, so it is hard to fathom how you could apply en masse changes to 300 PDFs. There is more to this story than you alude…

Highlight feature cannot reliably be undone in Preview app

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