Annotate in Preview - Underline Tool with Different Colors

Have you been able to change the color of the underlined text (default: red) with a right click?

Nope. Best I can do with right click or with the markup tool is highlight sections in different colors (where, at least, the underline color is the same as the highlight).

I can only show you how to do this manually. Haven't been able to figure it out with blocks of text. Underlining blocks of texts does allow you to remove portions of what was underlined, so I use this method to fill in those spots with different colors.

1. Choose the Line tool, and underline any text you like

2. Click on any line you've made so that the grey dots appear at the ends of the selected line, highlighting the annotation

3. Change the color of the selected line segment using the color tool

4. Repeat as necessary

I had the same problem. Essentially try to use the font tool to change the color. There are two ways to get it:

1. If you clicking the A in the additional menu bar. ( Not the A embedded in a box to the right of the bar pictured in the Tuttle's response above, but the A on the right of the icons starting at the left ) You can only get to click this if you click the text selection box ( containing Aa ) and then you will be selecting the color for text selection. But the font box will stay open, and you can then switch tool, and then select your font color....

2. Easier is to get into the underline mode, press ⌘T which will open the Font box, select your color, and you are done.

First, press the hotkey combination ctrl-command-H to turn on highlighting (or click the highlight button in the toolbar):

Then press command-T to open the Fonts window and click the button circled below.

Then choose your preferred colour and select text to highlight it.

Hopefully this is clear enough! 🙂

Hi, ezequiel -

This issue is cleaned up nicely in 10.9.

Just go to the Markup Toolbar item, choose your highlight color, then drag your cursor over the selected text. The Font menu doesn't come into play.

Hello all, I am using Mavericks and Preview 7.0 (826.4). Like many here, I use Preview extensively to view and annotate PDF files. Not being able to change the underline color is a serious setback for my workflow. Hence, I tried and created a "solution" that works if one has a working copy of Keyboard Maestro (KM). My KM version is 6.4.7 and I have not tested in any other versions. However, my macro is not particularly fancy, so I think it would work in older/newer versions as well. My macro is based on Catherine's blog ("A small bug in Preview enables to underline/highlight with any color"). Another note: this macro should work only with Preview 7.0 (Mavericks version). I have not updated my OS to Yosemite, so I cannot modify the macro for the Yosemite version of Preview at this moment. However, as I uploaded the original KM macro file, anyone familiar with KM should be able to modify it to a Yosemite compatible version. In a word, this is a kludge only for those who are desperate AND purchased KM.

Anyway, here is what you can do (again only if you have KM). Don't worry: you do this only once.

0) Download a compressed file “Archive.zip” from http://www.2shared.com/file/MCy7Qu1j/Archive.html

1) Open the zip file and put the Blank PDF.pdf on your desktop. (Keep it there)

2) Double click the macro file "Preview Underline Color Change Step.kmmacros", which will open in your KM.

3) In your KM, click Or by script. located under the New Trigger button. Then, select "Or by Applescript:"

4) You will see a short Applescript "--ignoring application... blah blah..." > Copy the content into your clipboard

5) Open AppleScript Editor (Applications/Utilities/AppleScript Editor) and paste the clipboard content. Then, save it as an Application somewhere (eg. Desktop).

That is it. Hard part is over. You only need to complete the above steps once. I have tested this trick on two separate Macs with success. From now, you only need to click the newly generated application to use the KM macro. (You can also assign a keyboard shortcut to the application: System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > … )

If everything goes well, the execution of the macro (again via KM) will open the small empty PDF file you saved on the desktop, and follow some crazy color picking steps. Don't interrupt the sequence: it will take only a few seconds. Once the sequence is over, you will see an open color picker box. From then on, you can open your own PDF file and select the underline (Command Control U) and select whatever color you want in the color picker and use it for your underlines. You can change to a Highlighter and return to the Underline and the color picker will still function. I have attached a sample screen capture with dizzying underlines: see below.

I think the trick will work as long as you keep the color picker box and Preview open. Each time you relaunch "Preview" application, you can execute the above macro application before attempting to annotate your own PDFs. Of course, we all want Apple to properly implement what I think is an important function for users like myself: PDF nerds :). But until then, our pursuit for some working kludges continues!

Too long a piece.. Sorry.

Happy Macintoshing,

Rev

Dear posters,

i just try to cool down, having tried to find for a good 45min now my red highlight ink i absolutely need.

Shall i start ranting first? No - discipline:

i'm in the same boat: need to highlight my text in red, in order to stick to standards in a collaborative document (@APPLE: think: professional/enterprise environment).

Could not find any options so far: not only the red ink got lost but so did that magic "Text-Color"-button (cited earlier) which could have been the workaround.

Did anybody find the magic key? Any sort of easter egg around?

Now for the rant:

Why needs APPLE kill features that simply worked so far and have been wormly welcomed and subsitute it with things that do absolutely and positively NOT work (pink as alternate color, loss of options to choose colors freely)?

Which kind of mindset or substance may trick a developer/designer into the conclusion that pink would be the more relevant color for highlighting than red?

My personal workaround must obviously now be: switching to ADOBE Reader (allows free color choice). Which is really sad because Preview.app got better all the time and as of 10.7 entered the level where i got dependent on it.

To me as a customer this seems to align with some kind of feature-drop spree happening in recent OS X updates, since somewhere past 10.7 Preview.app also made it impossible to view multiple documents in one single window and then close one of them without getting all the other documents also get closed or reset to their first reading page; the former version still could do all that. The Lion-release of Preview.app obviously was the alltime peak of this important application...

And a plethora of other similar things in OS-X/Mac are of the same kind (think: Kensington lock, iWork-slim-down-to-death, ...).

So please APPLE: get back to where you came from: "It simply works..."

Thats at least my personal perception/expectation of Mac: "it does everything - better".

So next stop for me:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Please do the same, to make the aforementioned deficits get fixed in some future update.

Cheers

Dear Lalhee,

respect, demonstrates how productive shortcomings can be!

But actually: wasn't Mac about "just works" and effortless usability?

No i often have to jump through hoops these days to get the most beasic things done (here my latest: how to rename files using preview).

Hope APPLE developers find back to their former canon, it's sometimes the small things that really are a pain...

I agree with ajayM3. This was really not intuitive, much easier to do in previous versions of Preview. I don't understand why they had to make it more difficult with the update. I wanted to underline red text and the red underline was very hard to see. Thank you, Henry, for at least showing us how it is possible, but Apple, please make it easy.

Yes please make it easy....

In a general manner we need a good way to setup default colors for every tool.

The annotations we do on our Macs with Preview.app ought to match those which were done with iAnnotate on ipad or other softwares... We need color customization.

I can't seem to figure out how to use a custom highlight color using the method described here. I can change underline colors, etc., but *not* highlight colors, which are limited to Apple-approved yellow, green, blue, pink and purple. Incredibly annoying as I use customized highlight colors in my document markups for consistency.

I had the problem of changing the line color of already-underlined words too. But I managed to solve it by removing the underline, then click on the underline icon without selecting any word. At this point the color palette will not be blurred out and you can choose the color as your wish. Lastly highlight any word that you want to underline and it underlines with your chosen color.

I was speaking to the highlighting referred to in the posts immediately prior to mine.

As far as underlining text is concerned, no previous (10.8) workarounds seem to apply in 10.9. There is now no apparent or hidden way of changing the underline color from red. And again, the Fonts menu doesn't come into play.