Can you highlight words in a document in Adobe Reader or a .pdf file?

I’m assuming you want to copy and paste. Preview in OS X will do this. If you are on Windows Foxit should work.

@johnpowell , I need to highlight keywords in a document, for notes. its in pdf format.

my adobe reader has the funcion on the tools panel… next to the one to select images…

Might need to convert the PDF to a word file first.

http://www.pdftoword.com/

That works pretty well. Then you can convert back.

@Thammuz, lucky you, I don’t seem to have that function
@johnpowell I think its easier to convert it to .doc, thanks for the site.

You can also edit pdf files in adobe editor. In adobe reader, you can only read/view but not edit.

Is highlighting same as fill colour / shade / shade background?

@prasad its supposed to be like using highlighter on paper, only it is used in a document in a computer.

Yeah, it’s easy do it in word rather if it is one time. But if you want to edit it again and again then pdf editor will be helpful. This one nitro is one of many (you can google it; search pdf editor, or online pdf editor).

If you mean highlighting it temporarily to select text for copying or something, yes, naturally, you can do it, as long as the pdf was created with text, not images. As long as the original pdf file has text data in it, not scanned images of the pages, you should be able to select the text. If the pdf has images, you might have to use OCR software like Abbyy(Google it), to extract whatever text possible from it.

If you want to give a permanent background color to text, I don’t think its possible in Adobe reader. You’ll have to try out an alternative pdf reader like Foxit (google it)

I believe the version of reader does not have the edit function; you may need professional to do that. If your version of reader does allow mark-up, the functionality will either be found under Tools (I opened up a .pdf on my Mac, and that functionality is grayed out) or under View>Toolbars, there will be an editing toolbar.

Adobe Acrobat Professional is the Adobe program that allows you to directly edit a .pdf file. It’s about US$100, and they’re up to version 9.1.2 or something like that.

I agree with @johnpowell, there are PDF-to-Word converter software programs available on the net (some may be free or free during a trial period). Then, in Word 2007, I believe you can convert back to the PDF format when you’re done highlighting.

MS Word exists to compose and create text. Adobe Reader is for looking at it.

In Adobe Acrobat Pro you can highlight text in a PDF, add boxes and lines, use rubber stamps, add pop-up notes, and all kinds of other stuff. It is one of the main ways that I edit documents professionally. Adobe Reader is pretty much look-but-don’t touch.

Hi,
you want to highlight words in a document in a pdf file. If highlight words is your desire. You need a PDF editor to edit the files as you want.
Good luck!

Try pdfescape.com