Annotations and highlights
11 May 2026
Waxcap™ gives you two ways to leave a note or a marker for yourself in your writing. Neither goes out with the book, as manuscript, reading copy and ePub exports remove them for you.
Annotations
You're three paragraphs into a scene and you realise the character's name might be wrong. You don't want to stop writing to go and check the character's notes. You want to leave a flag and carry on.
Press ⌘⇧A, type the note, and press the shortcut again to close it. The note sits in the line in a different colour, on a faint tint, so it reads as an aside without breaking up the paragraph around it.
Use them for anything you want to come back to: "Revisit this paragraph, feels too long." "Geoff's last name, check chapter two." "This is doing too much work." None of it will appear in the manuscript you send to an agent.
You'll meet each one again when you reread the passage, and Edit ▸ Find ▸ Find in Project… (⌘⇧F) searches the words inside them along with everything else. Once you've dealt with one, delete it like any other text.
Highlights
A highlight puts a marker-pen background behind a passage. Select the text and press ⌘⇧H.
Use one when you're reading back what you wrote last week and a sentence catches your eye. You don't have anything to say about it yet, you just want it to stay visible until you do. In Settings ▸ Editor you can choose a bright highlighter yellow or a softer colour that suits your theme.
In the file
Both are kept as plain text in the document itself: an annotation between {>> and <<}, a highlight between pairs of equals signs. So they're still there in a plain-text backup or a project archive, and in any document file you pass to someone else.