UPDATE: In PDF Studio 9 we added a temporary workaround to allow printing of the highlights from PDF Studio. We have set the highlights using an Alpha composite during printing which will allow the highlight to be transparent. This makes it so the text can still be seen but it will just not be as crisp because the colors are blending. We still hoping that a JDK update will resolve the issue in the near future.

 

Q: When I markup a PDF document with text highlights and then print the document, only the highlights print, not the text. It’s as if the highlights were opaque and not transparent.

A:  Unfortunately, the Apple JVM doesn’t support transparency composite when printing (it supports it when rendering on the screen though). This bug was reported a long time ago but has not been fixed unfortunately. Here is a bug reported on Apple Mailing Lists:
http://lists.apple.com/archives/java-dev/2003/Apr/msg00120.html

There is nothing we can do to fix this issue on our end.

We’re hoping that this issue will be resolved when we move to JDK 7.

As a workaround, we suggest printing documents with text highlights using Preview or Adobe Reader.