Highlights - PDF Viewer/Editor

It's a good tool for highligjhting. One of the weaknesses is that highlights which have a note should be displayed differently, so that you see there is a written note there. Acessability is lacking: It should be possible to configure the interface and change the fonts in the notes panel. It shoul be possible to choose the font and size (key for someone who needs more visible fonts).

Let me say I have tried every pdf tool around, no exception. I bought many of them to see the full features. This one is my currently preferred tool for reviewing papers. It’s far from perfect, though, and it has some annoying points missing, specially two: (i) it’s not possible to edit a note on the right section of the screen, or jump to the note in the pdf when selecting it. Finding the note on the page is cumbersome. (ii) it’s not possible to use a pen to make annotations, writing by hand, or arrows. Also, it’s not possible to adjust the border between the pdf and the notes when side by side. The search feature is a bit too basic. Also, the zoom on the iPad works fine but on a mac needs to improve. Having said that, this tool is a must. I have combined its use along with pdfexpert and marginnote.

This has app has two tricks, but lacks many basic features. Just short of $50 a year for a PDF app that has poor search, no outline or contents navigation. The markdown export is nice, but sorry the search is terrible. There is not way to see your search results without clicking through them one by one… that makes the app unusable for serious academic work. For half the price it would a great app, but at this price it's a hard pass. It’s I suspect there would be a lot more sales of an app like this if the price weren’t so steep. Students especially will struggle to pay this price. For the full price you would expect it to be feature complete, especially when competing apps are held up against it.

I was pretty excited when I first discovered this app, it’s a simple tool which initially was super helpful for me studying medicine. However I have recently noticed some bugs which can result in any highlighting I have done on a document suddenly disappearing as if it never happened when I next open the app. This is unacceptable and needs resolving ASAP. iPad Pro 12.9, iPadOS 13.6

This app has a couple of neat tricks, but ultimately the subscription is totally overpriced. It lacks basic features, there is no support for document outlines, and the search function is so basic that it cancels out the good part of the app. I know it's kind of a darling app for nerds because of the Markdown support, but MacStories and the like are not run by people who do real academic work. To be a real academic tool, search is critical. Apps like PDF Expert or PDF Pen display the search results for easy navigation, with Highlights you can't navigate to search results, you have to click through them one by one to find what you are looking for. If you are searching for keywords, this is a massive time suck. There is also no document map, outline or T.O.C. Grabbing the metadata is nice, but it hardly matters if you are already using other bibliographic tools. I'm yet to work out how it is actually useful. The annotation tools are awesome, but I would save your money until a proper search function is and better document navigation is added. If you need Markdown export, use PDF Expert.

I have no idea what I’m doing

Was my favorite but nah it became useless when it had bugs

Almost amazing, has some issues with certain documents where text highlights are wayy off from where the text appears rendering the app useless for some documents. The pro version is subscription instead of a one time purchase which is upsetting, especially when other alternatives always have a one time purchase option. Reached out via email too but was never responded to. Might eventually switch over, I don’t need many advanced features but I would like enhancing features without having to pay for it forever.

Can’t search in PDF documents

I bit the bullet and subscribed to this app, knowing (and hoping) that something better comes along that doesn’t require a pricey subscription to do something so relatively simple. Exporting highlights and notes from a PDF shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg and should be better managed by native tools. For the price, it lacks some basic features like the ability to add bookmarks and makes navigating lengthy PDFs cumbersome. To the developers… please add different page options for viewing PDFs, like single page turns as opposed to continuous scrolling. Some of us don’t like scrolling, and prefer the hard clean transition of a traditional page turn. Having these options would at least make this feel like the most basic of PDF viewers. The app does it what it’s supposed to do well, namely exporting highlights and notes in markdown, but is overpriced for the main functionality. If it were more imaginative, and offered additional value, I’d consider something like this, but for now am hoping that tools like omnivore and others improve their PDF annotating.