Highlights rendering differently on ipad and macOS

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Level 1

8 points

Highlights rendering differently on ipad and macOS

I own an Ipad air 11 M2 running ipad OS 17.6.1 and a MacBookPro 14" M1 Pro running MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1

When I highlight using 'Files' on the ipad using the apple pencil pro, everything looks fine even if I pass over the same word over and over. The color becomes darker, but it's still very easy to read and somewhat pleasing to see.

If I open the same edited PDF on MacOS, for some reason the highlighting renders in front of the text and more opaque. This is not a big deal if the highlighting was light, but if I happened to highlight more heavily, the text becomes impossible to read. Is there a way to solve this issue? I'm guessing the problem is on MacOS side.

MacBook Pro 14″

Posted on Sep 20, 2024 10:03 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

124,106 points

Sep 20, 2024 1:13 PM in response to numakun

And once you are done highlighting in the default open from the File app on the iPad, what steps do you take to open that same PDF in Pages on macOS? Save, Print, AirDrop, etc.?

I just copied and pasted the PDF that I highlighted in iPadOS to iCloud Drive and opened it with Preview. The highlight eclipsed the equation. Opening the same PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader did not.

Preview:

Acrobat Reader

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

124,106 points

Sep 20, 2024 1:22 PM in response to VikingOSX

I get the same result if I use the Share icon at the top of that displayed PDF page and choose Save to Files — designating iCloud Drive as the target. I have no reason to believe that using AirDrop would be any different and it suggests an incompatibility with highlight annotation on iPadOS 18 and Sequoia v15.0 Preview. The workaround is to use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (not Acrobat Pro) on the Mac.

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