Thursday, August 27, 2009

How to highlight text in LaTeX

Add the following to your preamble:
\usepackage{color}
\newcommand{\hilight}[1]{\colorbox{yellow}{#1}}
To highlight text in the body of your document, use
\hilight{this is some highlighted text}
Voila!

Of course, you can change the color from yellow to any of the supported colors. For a list of those, check: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Colors

UPDATE:

There is a problem with the previous method is that the color box does not wrap properly. Here's a much easier and robust way of doing this

\usepackage{soul}
To highlight text in the body of your document, use
\hl{this is some highlighted text}

Cite as:
Saad, T. "How to highlight text in LaTeX". Weblog entry from Please Make A Note. https://pleasemakeanote.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-highlight-text-in-latex.html

Posted by yNot at 9:27 PM
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21 comments:

  1. CharlieJanuary 15, 2010 at 7:49 AM

    That doesn't quite work for me - the yellow box can't follow line wraps so the highlighted text goes off the edge of the page...

    ReplyDelete
  2. yNotJanuary 23, 2010 at 12:37 PM

    Hi Charlie, I have updated the post with a more robust method.

    ReplyDelete
  3. SilencerJanuary 25, 2010 at 9:11 AM

    Hi, just wante to point out that sometimes normal use of the soul package causes \hl to create underlines. this can be fixed by

    \usepackage{color,soul}

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Christian PoupartMarch 30, 2014 at 12:34 PM

      Thanks for the post ! works for me
      using windows 8.1, and Ubuntu 13.10

      Delete
  4. AnonymousFebruary 11, 2010 at 4:56 AM

    try \hl{\emph{some text}} to see how badly it breaks.

    In this case, \hilight command works much better!

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownAugust 5, 2010 at 1:40 AM

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    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousNovember 11, 2010 at 9:34 AM

    whenever there is {} within the hilighted region {}, I got error messages using soul.

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousApril 14, 2011 at 4:27 PM

    thanks for this info I need it for my blog usagamezone.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. viagra onlineApril 20, 2011 at 2:23 PM

    is there a way to highlight a letters in html ? please post a tutorial about how to do that easily.

    ReplyDelete
  9. TimMay 3, 2011 at 4:00 AM

    Package soul works fine for me. I'm able to highlight text within LaTeX easily without undesired behaviour.

    However, is there an option to highlight text in one document using soul with different colours? For example line 1 with colour yellow, line 2 with colour magenta?

    Thanks for responses.

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousMay 9, 2011 at 10:24 PM

    Package soul also works fine for me. Trouble with color package.

    ReplyDelete
  11. AnonymousMay 19, 2011 at 4:51 AM

    Awesome thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  12. cialis onlineMay 19, 2011 at 12:02 PM

    I do not understand what is \usepackage{color}
    \newcommand{\hilight}[1]{\colorbox{yellow}{#1}}????? please help me!! I think that it is a little bit confused!!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Roger ChampagneOctober 25, 2011 at 8:24 AM

    @yNot and @Silencer, your combined solution did it for me, thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  14. GoNovember 2, 2011 at 9:36 PM

    I got error messages if I use multibyte languages in the \hl{...}.

    ReplyDelete
  15. iCodeiExistMarch 8, 2012 at 6:00 PM

    If by chance you're using the beamer document class for presentations:
    \colorbox{yellow}{your text}

    ReplyDelete
  16. UnknownApril 7, 2012 at 3:18 PM

    ichbinrene thanks dude, i was using "soul" but your post it's useful.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Benny NeugebauerFebruary 25, 2013 at 9:28 AM

    Very cool. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  18. UnknownNovember 6, 2013 at 6:13 AM

    It works very well. Btw, how to change the color of highlight part?

    ReplyDelete
  19. Sandeep Singh SheoranNovember 13, 2013 at 4:20 AM

    useful, thank you

    ReplyDelete
  20. Laura RazoDecember 3, 2013 at 8:31 PM

    To fix the emph break, dont include the initial { after emph. Then end the \hl command at the end of the text to be italicized. The ending } will end the emph as well as the \hl command. Start the \hl command again after the italicized part.

    ReplyDelete

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