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Change Multiple PDF Highlight Colors at Once

Shows how to select multiple text highlights in a PDF at once and change their color in bulk within Foxit PDF Editor.

Answer

Support for Foxit PDF Editor v11 and v12 has been discontinued as of August 13, 2025. Upgrade to v14 to continue receiving support.

 

Descriptions

I have a PDF containing hundreds of pages which I have highlighted lots of texts in multiple pages in the PDF file. I would like to quickly select all of those text highlights at once and change color for all of them in a quick way.

 

Solution

To quickly select all highlights and change color for them from a PDF file in Foxit PDF Editor/Reader for windows desktop without manually selecting and changing color one by one, please do the following procedures:
1:Open Comments panel on the left corner in Foxit PDF Editor/Reader for windows desktop, please choose to sort those comments by type there where you could find different types of comments that have been categorized.

2:Please double-click the type of comment to expand all highlight comments in the comments panel.

Then please place your mouse on the last highlight comment and single click on it to make it to be selected, then keep pressing the " Shift " key on your keyboard while clicking on the first highlight comment to the last comment under ‘Highlight’ in the comments panel, then you will find that all of the highlights are selected.

3: Right-click on those selected highlight comments, click on the " Properties " option in the pop-up context menu to bring the “Highlight Properties” dialog box.

4: In the “Highlight Properties” dialog box, please click on the color box under the “Appearance” tab to open a color palette where you could select a new color for all of the selected highlight comments.

 

Note: the approach mentioned in this article is only applicable to Foxit PDF Editor/Reader for windows desktop only, it cannot work with Foxit PDF Editor/Reader for Mac yet.
For Foxit PDF Editor/Reader for Mac V12 or lower versions, there is still not any way to select multiple comments in the left comments panel at once. As a temp workaround, please keep pressing the "Command" key while single-clicking on the highlights one by one on one PDF page to make all highlights on the same page to be selected, then right-click on one of the selected highlights and choose "properties" option to select a new color you like under the "appearance" tab in the pop-up "Highlight Properties" dialog box,click on "Close" to close the "Highlight Properties" dialog box,then you we will find that all the selected highlights will be highlighted with new color in the page currently being viewed.