Hi everyone,
Following the update to macOS 27, we have observed a regression/behavioral change in PDFKit regarding how markup annotations (particularly highlights, underlines, and strike-outs) are drawn.
Issue Description
Whenever a markup annotation (PDFAnnotationSubtypeHighlight / PDFAnnotation) has associated text or contents, PDFKit now automatically renders a yellow speech-bubble / comment note icon directly adjacent to the highlighted region in the margins.
Visual Symptom: Instead of a clean text highlight overlay, the document margin is immediately cluttered with comment bubble icons for every single highlighted passage or line.
Impact across applications: Because this rendering occurs within the native PDFKit.framework rendering layer, rolling back host applications to earlier releases does not alleviate the issue. It affects both system PDF rendering and third-party PDFKit-based viewers (such as Skim).
Expected Behavior: Standard highlight and markup annotations should display their color fill over the text without forcing an external comment icon unless an explicit pop-up / sticky note annotation is requested.
Third-Party Tracker Reference
This issue is actively being investigated and tracked in the Skim open-source project here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/skim-app/bugs/1617/
Questions for DTS / Community:
Is there an undocumented flag, preference, or API attribute on PDFAnnotation / PDFView in macOS 27 to disable or hide these automatic markup pop-up icons globally or per annotation?
Is this change intentional as part of a redesigned annotation interaction model, or is it an unintended side effect of internal note rendering changes?
Any workarounds or insights would be greatly appreciated.
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