Abstract: An improved technique for highlighting text objects accurately, reliably and quickly is disclosed. The technique minimizes the number of expensive region operations required to produce the necessary highlighting by combining bounding boxes of adjacent objects (e.g., words) using rectangle operations. The resulting rectangles are then used to form a region. The complexity of the regions is limited by limiting the number of rectangles that can be included within a region. Once a region is formed, the pixels of a display screen that are within the region are inverted to designate the objects within the region. However, before inverting the pixels, any overlap of the region with a previously highlighted region is eliminated or clipped from the region. The portion of overlap can be determined by rectangle operations instead of expensive region operations.