At the moment, I use the packages 'soul' and 'color' to highlight sections of my work. I do this to flag that I'm not happy with what I've written yet, and need to redraft. I want to do this in the finished version so I can see the issue clearly, rather than just putting a %-ed out note in the code.
What I would really like to do is to be able to temporarily suspend this highlighting, so I can print out a non-highlighted version to give to my supervisor. I don't want to go through and take out each \hl{} where I've an issue, as I would like to be able to keep a version that shows my worries for myself, whilst being able to quickly submit a version that doesn't show them.
Simply taking the soul package out of the header for the print-out version doesn't work, as that leaves the \hl command undefined.
Has anyone got a suggestion of a way of doing this? I don't mind if it uses a different highlighting method than the one I'm currently employing.
Probably it's better to use the todonotes package. It can be disabled by giving an option. See the manual for details (Section 1.2 - Package options, p. 3f).
If you want to stick with the packages you're using now, when you want a printable version, you could take out the packages, and add a line defining the command(s) in question to do nothing, e.g.:
\newcommand{\hl}[1]{#1}
Or even leave the packages in, and use:
\renewcommand{\hl}[1]{#1}
to deactivate them. (Then it's just a matter of commenting out that line to put the highlighting back in.)
You can also use the xcolor package with the usenames option to temporarily suspend highlighting. Just redefine \hl to \textcolor{black}{#1} or similar to disable it for printing.