Annotate Your Books with Highlights

There are a number of ways that you can create a highlight:

1. Selection Menu

To highlight with this method, click and drag to select the text you want to highlight. The Selection Menu will display showing the six styles you’ve used most recently. Click a style to apply it to your selected text.

Click the Highlighting icon to open the full highlighting panel if you don’t see your desired style in your most recently-used highlights.

Note

Note: If you don't see the menu after selecting text, ensure that Show Selection Menu is enabled in Program Settings.

2. Context Menu

To highlight with this method, right-click your selection to open the Context Menu. With the menu open, choose Selection or Reference on the left side to display your five most recently-used highlighting styles on the right.

Note

Note: Click the Highlighting icon to open the full highlighting panel if you don’t see your desired style in your most recently-used highlights.

3. Highlighting Panel

You can open the Highlighting Tool from the Tools Menu.

Open the Highlighting Tool

As mentioned above, you can also open the Highlighting panel from the Selection or Context Menus by clicking the Highlighting icon. Or you can click Highlighting in the Notes tab of the resource you are studying.

By default, the panel contains several categories of highlights: solid colors, emphasis markup, highlighter pens, and inductive/precept. To apply any highlight, select text in a resource and select a style from the panel.

Note

Note: You can assign a keyboard shortcut (0-9 or A-Z) to any style. Click the corresponding command button to the right of the highlight name and choose a shortcut.

You can delete a highlight from the Selection Menu, Context Menu, or Highlighting Panel.

Alternatively, select a highlight and press Shift + ⌘Cmd + K (Mac) or Ctrl + Shift + K (Windows).

For example: If highlighting is applied to John 1:1–13, a highlight is added to the Notes tool with that reference range. If the highlighting for verses 6–8 is later erased, a second highlight will be added with the reference range John 1:8–13 and the original note will be changed to John 1:1–5. Content entered in the original note will remain there.

You can create your own highlighting palettes and styles in the Highlighting Panel.

Create a custom palette.

Click New palette and provide a descriptive name.

Note

Note: You can also duplicate an existing palette. Right-click on any palette and choose Duplicate from the menu. This will duplicate the entire palette, not just an individual highlighter style.

Create a new style.

Expand the command button next to any palette and choose Add a New Style.

Expand any of the seven highlighting aspects to customize the style. A preview of the style will appear at the top of the panel as you add or remove options. When finished, click Save.

• Font Styling: typeface, color, bold, italics, size, etc.

• Background: color behind the highlight

• Text Effects: add glow, outline, or shadow

• Borders & Lines: customize lines or boxes around the text

• Image: choose an image and set how it interacts with text (the final option in the Image section allows you to set a transparency percentage; this allows you to adjust the translucency of your image in 10% increments)

• Insert Text: add custom text before, after, above, or below your highlight

• Labeling: attach custom labels to categorize any text highlighted for advanced searching based on those custom category or attribute (learn more about labels and how to use them in your searches)

Apply custom styles as you would built-in styles: select text in a resource and apply your new style.

To edit any custom style, expand the command menu and select Edit.

Note

Note: If you want to apply a different style to all highlights in a given style, expand the old style’s command menu , click Restyle annotations, and choose your new desired style from the drop-down menu. All highlights in the old style will move to the new style. You cannot undo this action.

When highlighting is applied to text, a new highlight entry will be added to the Notes tool. All highlights are tagged so you can quickly locate them by filter or search.

You can assign any palette to a specific notebook for more organization. Click the command button on the Palette name, click to open the Notebook menu, and choose a notebook from the list.

You can create notebooks in the Notes tool (learn more about notebooks).

To add your own notes to any highlight, open the entry and provide your comments. When you remove a highlight, the corresponding note entry will also be removed. If you added a personal note to the highlight, your personal note will remain in your Notes tool without the associated highlight.

Once you’ve created highlights, you can control how and when they display. While viewing any book with highlights, select the Notes tab, open the Show notes and highlights dropdown and toggle Show note indicators control to view or hide all highlights and notes.

If you’ve highlighted in a particular Bible, you can still see those highlights in any other version of the Bible. Enable the From other books with corresponding text option at the bottom of the dropdown menu.

You can search for text (or other data) within highlighting styles. Select the Search menu, set the Search mode to Precise, specify the highlighting style within which you want to search, and enter your search term.