The Markup “ Highlights “ tool in MacOS is sometimes grayed-out and unusable.

When I’m using Markup on my Mac on a series of files with various file extensions - PDFs, PNGs (screenshots), Pages documents, JPEGs, etc., - the highlight tool is sometimes grayed-out and unusable.


I couldn’t figure out if it has something to do with the file extensions (as above) or not.


Does anyone know why this is happening?


I’m using MacOS on a 2023 Mac with the latest version of Ventura as of this date.

iMac 27″

Posted on Aug 6, 2023 12:30 AM

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1 reply

Aug 6, 2023 03:38 AM in response to iamian12

The Highlight tool is meant to highlight text. Traditionally this would only work with pdf files that had actual text - ie not in scanned images, not in jpeg or png, etc.


Maybe now, with the AI capabilities in recent OS versions, namely the ability to identify text in images, it works in more cases, I have not tried it.


Are you saying that it does not work even when there is text selected?

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The Markup “ Highlights “ tool in MacOS is sometimes grayed-out and unusable.

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