macosmarkupmojavescreen capture
When I take a screenshot in macOS Mojave, I get a handy screen with Markup tools to edit the screenshot. But I’ve never been able to get the “highlight” feature to work.
I want to highlight text on a page in yellow, similar to a highlighter pen. It looks like it should do it, but the highlighter tool is always disabled. Nothing I do seems to enable it.
Does this tool work? How can I use it?
I could not find a way to do this using Preview. I tried to cheat by using the line drawing tool, and setting the color to a transparent yellow. Unfortunately, Preview doesn't seem to allow transparency with its shape tools. (To see what I mean, draw a line, then bring up the color picker window and move the Opacity slider around -- it's either all or nothing.)
As an alternative, I suggest Adobe Reader (I receive no commission). Its text highlighter has the same limitation as Preview's, but its line drawing tool supports transparency. Open up the Comment pane on the right, then the Drawing Markups section. Right click on the line tool and select Tool Default Properties to change the lines' color, opacity, and thickness. You also might want to enable Keep Tool Selected so you can quickly highlight multiple areas.
Instead of the line tool, you might prefer the rectangle tool. Follow the same steps as before, but additionally set the Fill Color to be the same as the Color (and make sure the Transparent checkbox is NOT selected for the Fill Color).
If you open your images in Apple's Preview, you can use the toolbar to add arrows, and text:
Then you can command-click each of the elements to move them respective of each other's position.
All of these annotations were done with Apple's Preview. You can do the same thing for PDFs as well.
And of course, taking screenshots are incredible easy in MacOS. cmd-shift-4 with a space bar afterwards lets you take pics of windows.
Best Answer
You can open the image with Preview and build your own sticky. Under the Tools menu go to Annotate and select a rectangle. Adjust size of rectangle and then set fill color to yellow and the line color to none. This results in a yellow rectangle. Now under Annotate select text. This puts a small text box on your image. Move this to inside yellow box and type in your own text. Now save the file as a jpeg or whatever you like and your image will have a yellow sticky on it. This maybe be to long a process for you but it works. See image below for an example.