Sonny Software

Having an interesting issue on 13.4.... can't seem to remove highlights or underlines made on PDFs (remove highlights/underline won't work). The only way to do this is to go into the Notes pane and remove the highlight manually. Interestingly, there is a locked button next to the highlight (in the Notes pane) - might this have something to do with it?

The lock icon for highlighted notes means you can't edit the content (but you can delete the highlight).

I can add highlights and remove them (by selecting them an pressing Delete) in 13.4. Is that what you're doing?

Jon
Sonny Software

Silly me - hitting delete on the keyboard does the trick. Strangely enough, right clicking the annotation and clicking "Remove Highlight" or "Remove Underline" doesn't do it for me. Not sure if this is a bug or not.

Thanks for the response!

Do you have some utility process installed for PDFs? Right-clicking on a PDF highlight (which Bookends doesn't detect or control, btw) doesn't bring up any such option for me.

Jon
Sonny Software

I do have PDF Expert installed. Might that be what it is? It’s also my default PDF viewer that bookends ports out to.

I wouldn't have thought so. Why not send a screen snap of the right click to menu to tech support (support@sonnysoftware.com)? I'm curious.

Jon
Sonny Software

Here you are:

Thanks, never saw that before. I'm on a Mojave machine right now, maybe it's Catalina? But if so, it should do what it says and remove the annotation, since Bookends is using the macOS APIs to create them.

Jon
Sonny Software

Indeed I am on Catalina and can confirm that the clicking the button on right click does not remove the annotation. Your suggestion to just hit delete on the keyboard does indeed work. Happy to help debug in other ways if I can!

Thanks, but nothing to debug. Whatever process is creating that menu, it's not Bookends, so if it's not working it's on them.

Jon
Sonny Software

Just tried in Catalina -- yes, that's where the menu comes from.

The annotation options work in Preview but not outside it. This isn't the first time that Apple has added some PDFKit-specific contextual menus that don't work outside of Preview...

Jon
Sonny Software