How Do I Create Highlighted Text In Mail or Pages?

Comments: 2 Responses to “How Do I Create Highlighted Text In Mail or Pages?”

Gary Rosenzweig

11 years ago

If by highlighted text you mean a rectangle of color behind a few words -- I don't know of a way to do that easily in Mail, but you can in Pages easily. And you can also do it in TextEdit and copy and paste from TextEdit into Mail.
But you can certainly make text stand out in many ways easily. For instance, you can make it bold or italics. You can also change the text color. You can increase the font size.
For something simple like that, in Mail you would first make sure you are editing in Rich text mode, not Plain text. That is in the Format menu when you are composing a new message. Then alter the text using either the Format menu or the handy toolbar at the top that will show you choices for colors, fonts, etc.
Same thing in Pages. Select text and use the Format menu.
But in Pages you can also set a color to go behind text, so it looks like you may have highlighted it with a marker. To do that, select the text and then open the Inspector. Go to text Text inspector section, and then More. THere you can set a Background Fill for the character or paragraph. Set the color and turn it on with the checkbox.
It is similar in TextEdit. But there is actually a background color "chip" in the toolbar at the top. So you can easily set the background color and highlight a piece of text. Then copy that text and paste it into a Mail message that is rich text and you've got it.

Janice McLeod

11 years ago

Thanks Gary, these suggestions worked perfectly. For pages, it was so easy I'm surprised I didn't find it! And the Textedit solution worked great for mail. I really appreciate your simple to follow instructions, especially the videos :)