📒 Feature Focus: Logos Highlights

Jason Stone (Logos) · 2025-05-30T15:25:30+00:00

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Hello Logos Community,

Today, let's shine a spotlight on a fundamental yet incredibly powerful tool in your Logos toolkit: Highlights. It's more than just marking text; it's about visually organizing your insights and making your Bible truly yours.

Highlights allow you to visually categorize and emphasize passages that resonate with you, reveal a theme, or require deeper study. Whether you're tracking theological concepts, identifying sermon points, or simply marking passages for memorization, a well-designed highlighting strategy brings your study to life.

How Highlights Help Your Study:

Visual Organization: Create custom highlighting styles and palettes to color-code different themes, doctrines, or personal applications. This visual system helps you quickly grasp patterns and connections across your text.
Multi-Version Consistency: Review your highlights across different Bible versions. What you've marked in one translation can be visible in another, providing a consistent visual reference as you compare texts.
Efficient Review: Just like notes, you can sort your highlights by Bible book, making it incredibly simple to review all your marked passages from a specific book or section of Scripture.

Highlights transform your digital Bible into a dynamic, personalized study companion. They help you quickly revisit key passages and reinforce what you're learning.

Learn More About Highlights →

I would love to hear from you! What's your favorite way to use the Highlights feature in Logos? Do you have a unique color-coding system or a specific workflow that helps your study? Share your tips and tricks (and helpful screenshots) in the comments below!

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Comments

Paul

Some time ago @Mark Barnes (Logos) referenced looking into Logos integrating highlights with Readwise.io. Any updates on that?

If Logos did that, my Kindle & Kobo purchases would default to Logos instead. Readwise highlights & review are the best way of revisiting highlights.

I'm unsophisticated with highlights. What gives me joy is a good variety of roygbiv/vibgyor colours on each page, preferably lots of pretty pastels. Really!

Bill

The only time I use highlights now is in visual filters.

I basically gave up using highlights in any other way for three reasons

They create a note for each highlight. If I wanted a note with a highlight I would create a note from the notes tool to begin with and add the highlight from the menu inside the note's toolbar.
My use of highlights was only for marking up text temporarily while I was reading through a book, because there is not a convenient way in my opinion to delete them (especially if there is a lot of them) it wasn't worth the hassle.
When I did use a highlight along with its corresponding note, hovering over it doesn't give me a pop up sample of the note like a note symbol/icon does that is next to the anchored text or selection of an actual note does.

DMB

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1370818#Comment_1370818

Agree, agree, agree. I do highlight but then delete them all. I just hate a book with someone's highlights.

Michelle

I use it to visualise who’s talking, a turning point, or the verse that pop out, that helps a lot in Bible study.
I don’t like to highlight my physical Bible, so in Logos where I just use it freely because I can always undo is such a joy, thank God!

NichtnurBibelleser

I gave an example of my use of Highlights here.

Will the request to separate Notes and Highlights be pursued by Logos ?

NichtnurBibelleser

By the way, regarding the Web App:

Could we bring the possibility to use all Highlighters to the Web App (not only the last used ones)?

Could the Preview Colors be shown when choosing a Highlighter in the Web App? Mine only show a grey field (and the name when hovering over it).

GaoLu

I highlight everything possible so my chldren's children's children can someday subscribe to Logos and see great-grandpa's highlights. But which great grandkid inherits a million highlights?

Just kidding!

I have extensively complex and sophisticated highlighting pallettes which I seldom if ever use. But they were fun to make.

What I actually use :

Yellow for stuff I might want to catch my eye next week. (mapped to Y key)
Green for stuff that is almost but quite as important as yellow. (mapped to G key)
Purple for meh-level importance, but noteworthy. (mapped to P key)
Orange for stuff that is super critical!!! (mapped to O key but i always for get this)
Red for warning, this may be over the top important. Used rarely because I don't care for the color red unless it's my wife's hair. (Might be mapped to R key, I cant remember)
Blue is balderdash. Horrible theology. Sit up and take note how wrong this is! (yep, the B key)

The idea, years ago, was that I could someday search for stuff by topic, importance, etc. Trouble is, I never did that.

More usefully, I mixed and matched colors (depending on my mood and whatever color was handy) to separate ideas. Now that was useful!

One more super-useful thing: I mapped numbers to my numbers. Punch the 1 key, and a happy little encircled 1 pops up by a word or idea in a list. 2, 3-9, same idea. I use that now and then. I like lists.

I would probably go back and remove all highlights (poor great-grandkids), but it's too much trouble. I just shut off visual filters and voila! My book is pure and pristine.

Ed Fernandez

I'm still trying to figure out how to divorce highlights from notes… Not every time I highlight a verse or paragraph I have something to say about that verse or paragraph….

MJ. Smith

Think of it as Highlights OR Notes OR Highlights with Note. No divorce is needed - it is simply a matter of how you choose to us it.

Michael Fillian

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1370919#Comment_1370919

I think their point is that it seems wasteful of resources. That is, my guess is that creating a Note creates a record in a database. The end result is that over time one can end up with tens of thousands of unused records that are not organized in any real fashion.

However, for me Notes are an absolute necessity because I like to add a lot of my own thoughts. The Notes tool is sufficiently usable (On the negative side, it it not MS Word. On the positive side, it is not MS Word) that it is a good way to record all of my own thoughts that are all linked and referenced back to the source.

I create a Note that is not anchored to any resource, and use that as my document. I then create Notes to highlight important thoughts. From there I simply copy any related text from the resource that is relevant to the Note and paste it into the un-anchored Note. For instance, the unanchored Note holds a whole Bible chapter. I annotate the individual Notes to add pointers to where they belong, and then just place them in a general Notes Storage Bin folder created for that purpose.

Jonathan Bradley

I make highlighter pallettes for everything and have them assigned to specific notebooks. For example, right now I'm doing a reading plan through Beeke's Reformed Systematic Theology volumes 1-4, and I have a notebook for just my notes that I have, as well as a highlighter notebook where all my highlights go.

Now that I have learned more about highlighter pallettes and the like, in the past year, I am utilizing them and organizing them in a much better manner.

Ryland Brown

I just created a highlight palette that utilizes labeling based on the Lexham Survey of Theology. The attributes are based on the subsections in the TOC of each major category and I’m using the list option to add those sections. With tagging and my own thoughts in the note, I’m really happy with how narrow I can get which highlights I want. I’ve also set searches for those labels in my favorites to easily remember what I’ve put together.