Guides
How to highlight a PDF during trial
A highlight does one narrow job: it tells the room which words to read. Used on a single sentence at the moment a witness is asked to read it, that is powerful. Spread across half a page, it becomes wallpaper.
This guide is for counsel who will be putting language on a screen and asking someone to read it into the record, and for whoever prepares those pages beforehand. By the end you will have a method for choosing the passage, a color and coverage habit that survives a bad projector, and a short routine for marking a passage live when a witness says something you did not expect.
Before you start
Have the PDF, the page number, and the exact quotation you want on the record. Write the quotation out in your outline rather than trusting yourself to find it under pressure; the sentence you highlight and the sentence you read should match word for word.
Text quality decides how well highlighting works. A digitally produced PDF gives crisp characters that stay legible under a translucent color. A 150 dpi scan of a photocopy gives gray mush that a highlight makes worse. If the copy is poor, get a better one before trial — there is guidance in scanning and PDF quality for exhibits.
One more preparation habit: record page and paragraph for every passage in a simple list, because you cannot search inside a PDF in Exhibit Room. Ex. 007, p.9, ¶3, "…shall indemnify…" is all it takes and it is worth ten minutes of nerves.
Step by step
-
Choose the shortest passage that carries the point
One sentence beats a paragraph; a clause beats a sentence if the clause stands on its own. The shorter the highlighted text, the more the eye is pulled to it and the less opportunity the other side has to ask about the surrounding words. If two separate sentences matter, consider showing them as two moments rather than one busy page.
-
Show the page whole before you show it highlighted
Context first, emphasis second. Let the room see that the sentence sits in a real document with a heading, a date and a signature somewhere below, then move in. Skipping straight to a magnified yellow stripe invites the suggestion that you are hiding what is around it.
-
Keep to one color, or at most two with a stated meaning
A single color reads as emphasis. Four colors read as a code the jury has to learn, and they will guess at it wrongly. If you do use a second color, say what it means the first time — for example, the contract language in one color and the witness's own words in another.
-
Match the coverage to the words, not the line
Highlight the words you will read, ending where the quotation ends. A highlight that runs to the end of the line, or spills into the next paragraph, tells the room you were careless with a document you are asking them to trust.
-
Prepare highlights in advance wherever you can
Marks drawn quietly at your desk are neater than marks drawn while sixteen people watch. Open the exhibit, select the highlight tool, and drag across the passage; adjust the shape afterwards rather than trying to get it right in one pass. Exhibit Room autosaves annotations and supports undo and redo, so a bad drag costs nothing.
-
Set the tool you will need as the default
If most of your markup is highlighting, make that the tool that is already active when you open a document. Exhibit Room has a default annotation tool setting, alongside a default zoom mode, which removes two clicks from every page you touch during a long preparation session.
-
Have a routine for marking live
Sometimes a witness points at language nobody planned to use. The routine is: stop presenting, mark the passage in the exhibit view, resume. Exhibit Room's presentation mode does not allow editing — which is what stops you from ruining a page by accident — so press Esc, draw the highlight, and press Present again. Practise the sequence once so it takes seconds.
-
Display it at a size people can actually read
Once the highlight is up, fit the width of the page so the text fills the screen horizontally, and zoom further if the type is small. In presentation mode, W fits the width, + and − step the zoom, and F returns to the whole page when you are ready to move on. Read the passage yourself only if the witness has not; overlapping voices help nobody.
Examples
In the fictional matter of Smith v. Jones, Exhibit 007 is a 14-page letter from a supplier, and everything turns on two sentences in the third paragraph of page 9.
Preparation takes five minutes. The exhibit is opened, page 9 is reached from the thumbnails, the view is set to fit width, and the two sentences are highlighted — starting at "The supplier shall" and stopping at the period, not at the margin. Nothing else on the page is marked. The outline records Ex. 007, p.9, ¶3 and the full quotation.
At trial, counsel presents the exhibit, types 9 and Enter, and page 9 appears whole. The witness confirms what the letter is. Only then does counsel press W and zoom once, so the highlighted sentences fill the screen, and asks the witness to read them aloud. A follow-up question sends the display back to F for the whole page, where the signature block answers who wrote it. Three keystrokes, one highlight, one point made.
Related terminology
The document carrying the highlight is an exhibit once it is marked in the proceeding, and it needs to be received before the jury sees it — see admitted exhibit. Where a highlighted page is used only to help a witness explain testimony, it may belong in the category of an illustrative exhibit, which is worth raising with the court before it goes up.
Frequently asked questions
Can I highlight text by selecting it, the way I would in a word processor?
Exhibit Room's highlight tool is drawn over the page rather than bound to selected characters, so you drag a shape across the words. On a scanned document that is the only approach that works at all, since there is no text layer to select.
Will a yellow highlight show up on a courtroom projector?
Usually, but test it. Older projectors wash out light colors badly, and a dark courtroom setting can shift how a translucent color reads. Check on a screen of about the size you expect before the day.
Can I remove a highlight after the trial day is over?
Yes. Select the annotation and delete it, or use undo while you are still working. Nothing is written into the PDF, so removing a highlight leaves the original document exactly as imported.
How do I highlight the same clause in two different exhibits?
Mark each one separately; there is no copy-and-paste between exhibits. In practice this is a good constraint, because two documents rarely want an identical mark in an identical place.
Highlight a passage and put it on the screen
No credit card required · Works offline · No subscription