The Marks list

Everything marked in the document you are working in.

The list follows the tab you are in: choosing another tab shows that document's marks, not the ones you were just looking at.

Marks and Talk are one list, filtered two ways

They show the same objects. A mark that has been put up for review is in Talk, and a mark that has not is in Marks. Each mark is in one list, never in both.

Review ▸ Put a Mark Up for Review moves a mark across. The same item, now reading Keep This Mark to Myself, brings it back.

Nothing promotes a mark on its own. Answering a note of your own leaves it a note of your own. A mark another reader made stays in Marks until you say it is worth discussing. What you put up for review is exactly what leaves the building when you send a copy, so the application never promotes a mark by guesswork. It waits to be told.

See Talk and Sending a document for review.

The disc beside each mark

Every row carries a small disc, and it says two things at once:

its colour is the mark's own colour, the one you drew it in, so a yellow highlight is yellow in the list;
the symbol inside it says what kind of mark it is: a highlighter, a square, a line, and so on.

A black-out shows an eraser symbol, whatever shape it was drawn as. Declaring a rectangle a black-out changes nothing about the rectangle, but the disc changes, because the disc reports the kind rather than the shape.

The symbol is drawn in black or white, whichever can be read on that colour. The choice is made from how bright the colour looks rather than from its raw value, so a saturated blue takes a white symbol and a saturated yellow a black one.

Where a new mark lands in the list

Drawing a mark selects it, and the pane scrolls to its row, with a few rows showing below it so it is not sitting on the rim. On a document with thousands of marks the row would otherwise be off-screen.

This is a property of the pane, not of the page: the page's own zoom and scroll position stay exactly where you left them when a mark is made. See Reading a document.

What you can do from the list

Select a mark: the page goes to it.
Delete: removes the selected mark, exactly as pressing Delete on the page does.
Filter by kind: highlights, underlines, black-outs, links out, links in, and the rest.

Arming a tool puts that tool's kind back on the filter, so choosing the highlighter does not leave you looking at a list that hides highlights.

The Marks Shown bar

Three controls, and between them they decide what is drawn on the page as well as what is held in this list. Turning a kind off does not tidy a list; it takes those marks off the sheet. While anything is being kept off, a sign with a count appears in the status line. Pressing it puts every kind back and clears anything typed in this pane's search field, which are the two ways a mark can go missing. The sign says nothing when nothing is hidden, so its appearing is itself the information.

Show Marks and Show Talk are the two switches, and they ask whose marks rather than which kind. A private note and a note put up for discussion are the same kind of mark and differ only in who is meant to read them. Working through a review with Show Marks off shows the review and nothing else: your own notes, written after the document went out, are exactly what you do not want on the page while you do it.

Which marks to show is the pull-down beside them, and it is a set rather than a choice: highlights and measurements but not comments is an ordinary thing to want. Its title says where it stands: All Marks, the kind's own name when exactly one is on, 3 kinds, or No Marks.

Holding ⌥ turns any row into Only this. One trip through the menu instead of unticking every other kind.
Show Every Kind puts both switches back on as well. It is the item a reader reaches for when marks have gone missing, and it would otherwise leave half of them missing.
Show No Kind empties it. An empty set means an empty page; somebody who has turned every kind off has said something.

The two switches are the application's; the kinds are this document's. Whose marks to show is a way of working and reads the same in every window. Which kinds to show is a decision about one document, so turning to another file does not carry it across, and a document nobody has narrowed still shows everything.

Drawing a mark of a kind that is hidden unhides that kind and switches Show Marks back on, rather than refusing the tool or hiding what you just drew. A mark just drawn also stays on the page until the filter is next changed.

What a row shows

Who made the mark, when, and the words it covers, or, for a mark that covers no words, where it is on the page. Each kind carries its own icon, so a black-out and an underline are told apart at a glance.

Replying from here

Choosing a mark shows its card, and the card carries the same reply box a card in Talk does: the same two clicks, and the same box that says Comment… or Reply… depending on whether anything has been said already. See Talk for the box itself.

The mark stays in this list when you answer it. A reply is words added to a mark, not a decision about who should read it. The reply appears as its own row beneath the mark's comment once the card is open; putting the mark up for review is a separate thing, asked for by name.

Selecting a mark also enables Reply to Mark…, which opens a Markdown editor (Write, Split and Preview, with Cancel and Save), a fuller way to write what the card's own box takes as a single line. It writes the same reply, and it moves the mark no more than the box does.

Marks made in other applications

Shapes this application does not draw but other people's documents do, such as squiggly underlines, polygons and open polylines, are listed too, because they are on the page. A mark that is on the sheet and absent from the list would read as a mark that is not there.