iPad How to highlight text in Notes?

[macstatic]

For some reason I'm unable to highlight text in the Notes app.
I highlight other documents (PDF and ebooks) all the time in the Books app, but Notes appears not to have this ability (but I'm confused as I've searched for help and read that it can indeed do this).
I'm on an iPad Mini (5th gen.) with iPadOS 16.4.1a.

 

[iStorm]

It's not possible to highlight text within the Notes app. You'd have to make it bold, italics, or underlined instead. Maybe what you're seeing is referring to an older version of Notes (I think it used to be possible), or highlighting PDFs within a note.

On the Mac, you can change the font color and it'll sync to your iOS/iPadOS devices...but again, no way to highlight. Also, there's no way to change the font color in iOS/iPadOS either...have to use a Mac.

 

[macstatic]

Thanks for confirming. That's too bad as I find it so useful to be able to highlight text in Books. What were Apple thinking by not allowing this?
I had my hopes with the "Handwriting tools" icon which allows you to choose pens with different colors, but I've found out they don't work with the text you've already written, just drawing in a blank section on its own. I suppose it's for what it's called (handwriting) but I really haven't looked into it. Maybe I can use my Apple Pencil to enter text and have it converted to typed text or something....

Yes, I'm already using bold/italic/underlined, but it's not the same thing as highlighting

I suppose changing the font color here and there can help, but I first have to transfer it over to the Mac. Is there a way to do this without using iCloud? I prefer not to spread my personal notes on to Apple's servers and use USB instead, but so far I haven't found any info on how to sync Notes this way (I sync Calendar and Contacts all the time via USB using iTunes though).

The only other thing I can think of is to export the note to Books (if this is possible) as a PDF file, then highlight it there, but of course this means I can't add/edit any of the text any longer.

UPDATE: whilst trying to export a note to the Books app (so I can get a PDF version of my note that I can highlight there) -which apparently isn't possible to do (there's no "Books" option among the export choices).....
I found something else which was interesting!

In the same "Export" menu in the Notes app there are two choices which caught my attention:
- Save to Files
- Markup

"Markup" was the first one to try, and indeed -it makes it possible to manually highlight, circle, underline or whatever with a pencil/pen type tool and choose the color! No actual highlight option though, but if you hold your finger steady it should do.
When done you get to save a PDF version of the Note within the Files app, and from there (the Files app) you get to export it to the Books app. That's a lot of hoops to jump through, so again I don't know what Apple were thinking.
"Save to Files" appears to do the same thing, but skip the ability to add your markup edits.