Highlights
Character-precise marking, organised into sets, with names attached to what your colours mean.
Styles
A highlight has both a colour and a style. There are four styles:
| Style | Appearance |
|---|---|
| Highlight | Filled background behind the text |
| Underline | Solid rule beneath the text |
| Dashed | Dashed underline |
| Dotted | Dotted underline |
Because style and colour are independent, the same colour can carry two distinct meanings — a solid red underline and a red fill are different marks.
Colours
Colours are stored as hex values, so you are not limited to a fixed palette. The highlight controls in the reader’s menu start with yellow, green, blue and pink; + adds any colour from the system colour picker. Drag colours to put the ones you use most first — the rest fold into an overflow control — and long-press one to remove it. Your palette syncs with your settings.
Precision
Highlights record character offsets within a verse, not whole verses. You can mark three words in the middle of a sentence and nothing else.
Sets
A highlight set is a named collection of highlights for one translation — and it is a module like everything else. That means you can keep more than one: a personal set and a set for a class you teach, a set for a study series you are working through. The first highlight you make in a translation creates a set for it automatically; create, rename and delete others in the module manager, and choose the active set from the highlight controls.
Themes: naming what a colour means
A theme attaches a name and optional description to a colour-and-style combination within a set. “Yellow fill” becomes Promises. “Blue dotted underline” becomes Questions to come back to.
This is worth doing for two reasons:
- It survives you. Six months on, you will not remember the scheme you invented; the app will.
- It makes colour a search key. Filtering search by that colour returns every passage you marked with it — an index of your own reading, built as a side effect of marking the text.
To add one, long-press a colour in the highlight controls and choose Add Theme; the name then shows under that colour. Themes belong to the active set, so a class set and a personal set can mean different things by the same colour.
Portability
A highlight set is a .lamp module containing the verse references, character offsets, styles, colours and theme names, so installing a set’s .lamp file brings the whole set in, themes included. If your sync method is iCloud Drive or WebDAV, each set syncs as its own file along with your other editable content — see Sync & backup.