One of the most common tasks when working with documents is to underline or annotate them on the iPad. In the Apple ecosystem there are some native applications that offer this type of underline tools and in this article we explain how to exploit them.
Files, an ideal app to underline your PDFs
Natively you have a very complete document manager on the iPad that is Files. In addition to collecting all the documents you have on different platforms such as Google Drive or iCloud Drive, you can also make edits. Among these editions highlights the text underline both with the finger and with our Apple Pencil, but only for those documents that are stored in iCloud Drive or locally. This is a small limitation that you will encounter but if we are in the Apple ecosystem this will not be a problem since you will surely be using your own cloud.
When we enter Files and browse our documents, with a simple touch we will enter one of them. If it is compatible, in the upper right corner we will see a small pencil in a circle that will open all the editing tools when we click on it.
The underline tools are very varied and are the ones that appear at the bottom. Here we find for example a pencil, a classic highlighter, a marker, a rubber and even the ruler to prevent crooked lines from coming out. If you are a student and you are studying your notes in PDF, the highlighter will be very helpful since it acts like the classics by applying a color line on a text to highlight it. There are many colors available and they are fully customizable. This tool can be used perfectly either with your finger or with the Apple Pencil.
Pages will allow you to underline as well as write
If, on the other hand, you do not want to edit a PDF file, but a document that you will continue to write in the future with a word processor, the best tool is Pages. When we talk about word processors we always have in mind the Microsoft suite with Word at the forefront. But the reality is that at Apple we also find its own office suite, with Pages being one of the programs that you can use to write documents and even underline them. Obviously we all have in mind the typical underline that can be done under a word by pressing the shortcut Command + U, but you can also underline with a pencil or marker as if we were working on a sheet of paper.
To enter this editing mode, simply open the document to be edited and click in the upper right corner at the three points. A panel will open with different options but you are interested in ‘Smart Annotation’. After clicking on this option, different editing and annotation tools will be displayed in the final part so that we can underline.
Among the tools that you can find highlights the marker, the pencil or the traditional highlighter. In addition to this, the colors that we can apply or the thickness of the tip is also variable. With all this you can make the editions that you like the most to be able to understand the whole text a posteriori and study it better.
As you can see, there are many native tools that Apple offers us to personalize all the documents without having to pay a euro for third-party applications. This is tremendously useful for students who tend to spend multiple highlighters to highlight the text that interests us most. But in this way it can be edited at any time, something that normally is not possible in a printed document.
Third party applications
If you are native applications that Apple offers us, they are not enough for you, in the App Store we can find various extremely interesting third-party developer apps.
Good notes
- Size: 320.4 MB
- Compatibility: requires iOS 12.0
- Language: Spanish and 14 more.
- Description: a classic application when editing documents. You can connect to cloud services and download the file you want to edit to make annotations and underline a specific text in a very simple way with our Apple Pencil or with your finger.
Adobe reader
- Size: 232.7 MB
- Compatibility: Requires iOS 12.0 or later.
- Language: Spanish and 20 more.
- Description: The Adobe suite is more than consolidated in our day to day as there are many tools we have. In iPadOS you can use Adobe Reader to open the PDF documents you have to combine them, organize the pages in a different way and of course, underline them.
There are many ways to edit a document on the iPad, which is an ideal device for studying. And you, what app do you use to highlight on the iPad?