Add notes and speech bubbles to a PDF in Preview on Mac
You can use notes and speech bubbles to comment on text in a PDF. These items are often used in conjunction with the highlight, underline and strike-through tools.
In the Preview app on your Mac, open the PDF you want to change.
Do any of the following:
Add a note: If the Markup toolbar isn’t showing, click the Show Markup Toolbar button . Click the Note button , then type text. You can use Touch Bar, if available. To change the note colour, Control-click the note, then choose a colour. You can drag the note to a different location.
Add a speech bubble: Choose Tools > Annotate > Speech Bubble, then type new text. You can use typing suggestions, if available. To resize the speech bubble, drag a blue handle.
Edit a note: Double-click a note to view it, then type new text.
Remove a note: Select the note, then press the Delete key on your keyboard (or choose Edit > Delete).
Change or remove the author’s name: Your macOS login name is used as the note author by default. To change the author name, choose Preview > Preferences, click PDF, then type a different name in the Name field. To remove the author name, unselect the “Add name to annotations” tick box.
View all the notes in a PDF: Choose View > Highlights and Notes (so the Highlights and Notes menu item has a tick next to it). All the notes in the document are displayed in the sidebar.
Search for text in notes: Choose View > Highlights and Notes (so the Highlights and Notes menu item has a tick next to it) to show those items in the sidebar. Then type a word or phrase in the search field in the toolbar.
Print notes: See Print PDFs and images.