Cannot highlight text in a PDF.

I am not sure about bank statements but our IT guy showed me that if export word document to pdf you can highlight the document and highlight lines all at once.  Instead of making the document look like a colouring book. Hope this helps

I have found a work around for this highlighting issue.  This was extremely frustrating for me over the past week!

Here you go:  Open your PDF file>Click File> Click Print> Printer = Adobe PDF>Click Print>Save as (Give this file name a new name)> You can now highlight as normal.

You will notice some of the pages are flipped around, so you will need to rotate them.  This should solve the issue.

You can all buy me a drink when you see me! 

Hi,

I am trying to highlight the PDF files which I get from saving my .docx files as .pdf files. In fact is about my CV where I tried to highlight some lines. 

Adobe Acrobat Pro XI on Mac running Mojave. 

The highlighter tool simply does not work on any documents. I have verified the properties (60% opaqueness, color yellow). When I select a section of text to highlight the selection gets a dashed lilne box around it that gets selected with the cursor, but it does not highlight. I have tried with multiple documents. Security on the documents is "none." Thanks for your help as this is a major problem keeping me locked into using paper copies of documents.

Not sure if someone solved this, but I had the same problem and fixed it (at least fixed what I was doing wrong) so it may help you. First, let me say I have Adobe Pro DC (paid version) so I don't know if the Free Reader has the same features.

My highlighter color somehow was switched to white (yes, you apparently can change the colors of the highlighter). So I was highlighting stuff, but couldn't see it because the page is white. Here is how I fixed it:

1. Open Adobe File

2. Click "View" at top.

3. Scroll down and click "Tools"

4. Click on "Comment"

5. Right Click on the Highlighter and click "Customize Comment Tool"

6. Scroll down and click to Add "Change Color" it looks like a Paint Can

7. Then Click that color and a color palette pops up with like sixteen different colors to choose, I picked light yellow (I'm boring like that)

8. Close Adobe

Next time you open the file it should stay the color you picked. At least it worked for me. Hope it helps.

Hi willm26591030,

Are you using the desktop app on a Windows/Mac computer or the mobile app on an iPad/iPhone or Android tablet/phone?  (Your forum post appeared in the mobile forum.  But it is not clear which app you actually use.)

It sounds like you have a different problem.  The other users in this forum thread had questions about how to find the commenting tools in the new mobile Reader app - Adobe Acrobat Reader for iOS or Android.

Your problem may be caused by the type of your PDF document.

Here are the most common cases.

(a) Scanned PDF document containing no real text

Try selecting text instead of highlighting text.  If you cannot select text at all (no matter how hard you try), your PDF document is likely a scanned PDF.  You can only add Text Markup annotations (Highlight, Underline, Strikeout) to real text, not to image of text.  You need to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to turn images of text into real text.

(b) Secured/protected PDF document

The security settings or restrictions of the PDF document explicitly disallow commenting.  The author/distributor of the PDF document does not want you to add comments to it.  All of the commenting tools will be disabled in this case.

(c) Encrypted PDF document

When security settings (e.g. password, certificate) or restrictions are added to a PDF document, the document becomes encrypted.  Unlike the desktop version of Adobe Reader, the mobile Adobe Acrobat Reader apps (for iOS, Android, Windows Phone) have the known limitation where changes cannot be saved to encrypted PDF documents.  Therefore, users are not able to make any changes to encrypted PDF documents.  The easiest way to work around the problem is to use the desktop version of Adobe Reader.

Pleas let us know if you would like us to examine your PDF document to identify the particular reason why you cannot highlight text.