Annotate in Preview - Underline Tool with Different Colors

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! 🙂

Thanks for the answer Ned, unfortunatelly it's still not working.

The colour button you have circled on the picture isn't there in the lastest Preview version, the one that updated with Mavericks.

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.

Thanks for the answer,

Tuttle and Ned get it wrong.

We are not asking how to change the highligh color, we're talking about the UNDERLINE 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.

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

I found another workaround for Preview 7.0 (826.4). It is a bit tedious but it works. I described it here.

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...

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

@Lalhee The second approach on your page works great, thanks!

(I'm on OSX 10.9.5)