Pages has for some reason just decided not to let me highlight any more. I am used to highlighting text with the shift-command-H combination, which has worked fine. But not only does it not work, when I go to the Insert menu > Highlight, that option is greyed out. I cannot highlight even by choosing the Highlight insert option.
What is going on, and how can it be fixed? Thanks in advance!
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.5
Proper highlighted text is called Text Background from the Pages Advanced Options ⚙️v menu below the font point size adjuster. Any Highlight from the Insert menu is intended for change tracking and author comments — decidedly not what the word processing community recognizes as true highlighted text. Just Apple being confusing again…
Proper highlighted text is called Text Background from the Pages Advanced Options ⚙️v menu below the font point size adjuster. Any Highlight from the Insert menu is intended for change tracking and author comments — decidedly not what the word processing community recognizes as true highlighted text. Just Apple being confusing again…
Once a segment of text has had the Insert Menu > Highlight applied to it, that menu item becomes grayed out until you select new text that has not been highlighted via the preceding menu item.
Pages allows you to set new character styles and associate them with unused keys F1 - F8. So, you could select arbitrary text, apply a yellow text background from the Advanced Options panel. Then, from the Character Styles panel, you click + to add the new character style, give it a name (e.g. Yellow Highlight), and optionally assign F1 - F8 to that style. And you never need to use the Insert menu > Highlight again. Of course, this is best made permanent in a custom template, because without that, this setting is valid only in the current document.
In Pages '09, Apple had a sub-toolbar with a color button reserved for true highlights. Thought I would post that here for reminiscent reasons:
These are the proper highlights that are readily portable across exportable document formats, and that other word processing applications honor. That functionality is now relegated to the Advanced Options panel > Text Background color since Pages v5 was released in Oct 2013. Clearly a head in the sand fixation by the Pages product team…
Not certain why you are focused on Insert menu > Highlights which is used exclusively for document change tracking. It uses the default author color (which might be yellow or not), and if you click on that so-called highlighted text, you will see that it is really a comment box for those tracking changes in the document. This is not the behavior of real highlighted text.
As long as you do not have any currently selected text, that Insert menu > Highlight menu item is grayed out.
Viking, you may be right, but a week ago I could swipe text and use the S/C/H keys to make the text look highlighted. Used to work, now for no reason it does not. The Pages Text Format option works but is WAY too cumbersome to do text highlighting while reading. And I still have no idea why the command keys went away, or how to get them back.
That (using the function keys to manage the task) is a useful tip — thanks! That is a one-key workaround. However, it still IS a workaround. The Insert Menu > Highlight option is now always greyed out. It simply does not work, for no reason apparent to me. I've been using Pages for 20+ years, and highlighting in Pages all that time. I do know (or did know) how to highlight using the Highlight menu option and/or the Shift-Command-H keys to highlight. But now neither the menu option nor the standard key sequence work any longer. I appreciate the workaround, but isn't it odd that a feature would simply go missing? Reboots to computer etc. make no difference at all.
I suppose the answer to the question about focus is habit. It's been a lot of years I've done things that way, and it's in muscle memory to highlight that way. So it's disorienting that it's gone. Don't even have to move my hands out of home row to do it.
You're right about the comment boxes. I just ignore them. The main thing is, efficient highlighting for the documents I'm working on. I don't need to export, don't need to do anything but draw my eye back to text I care about.
As you say, this is sand-in-the-head thinking, as highlighting while reading is a pretty common practice. In Word you can do it with one click (not sure if they have a keyboard equivalent, as I use Word as infrequently as possible, and have never investigated). Pages '09 was fine that way! But navigating through two or three levels of mouse clicks to make it happen is not on. The function key shortcut helps, but as you say, then that has to be built into a cross-document template. That's something the app should handle itself, and up until a couple of days ago, it did, at least sufficient for my purposes. Now broken, and I have no idea why. I do however appreciate the workaround suggestion. Still would prefer a fix, however.
Apple's product teams do not participate in these user-supported public communities.
If you want to communicate with the Pages product team, do so via the Provide Pages Feedback menu item. No guarantee they will respond to you due to the volumes of requests they must receive. I was thinking for Pages v12.1, there should be a highlight color option stacked directly beneath the existing Text Color item in the Format Text panel.
Yes. I have no expectation of help from Apple on this, and certainly not their product teams, who have a history of worsening great products despite the protests of users. (Mail being example #1 of this phenomenon.) My hope for a fix was from the much broader and more helpful community of users. I do appreciate your pointer, though, as that is what I'll have to do until (I hope) the problem goes away as inexplicably as it arose!
Highlighting in Pages greyed out
