Preview - Change Font, Color of Entered Text?

Well, it's not working for me.

I just upgraded from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 to El Capitan 10.11.3 with Preview 8.1.

I have forms downloaded from the USA's IRS and California's FTB. I can fill them in all right, but the typeface is always small, blue and Helvetica. I'd like to make the font bigger.

Placing the cursor into an empty field automatically opens a text box on the field. The "A" button on the Markup toolbar opens a little font menu popup, but it doesn't do anything. I can change it to whatever I want, but the text in the field with my cursor remains small, blue and Helvetica.

If I create a Text Box as an annotation, then the little font menu popup works fine with its text, just not the fill-in fields.

Enlarging the text in another application, then pasting it into a field on my form doesn't do anything. The text after pasting is always small, blue and Helvetica.

Under the Tools menu, there is no "Show Fonts".

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

--Gil

I don't know why I had so much trouble finding it, too, but it IS there and you can change it:

1. Click the toolbox to show the mark up tools

2. On mine, the icon to the furthest right is a capital, italicized "A".

3. Click this, and a drop down menu will give you your font options.

Just a little update for Preview 8.0, as I was looking for this feature.

In "View" select "Show Markup Toolbar" (Shift + Apple + A), there's the font panel

Under the Tools menu select Show Fonts. You can change fonts, select the size, and the tab with a green box allows you to changes color. There are several boxes across the color set - you might want to look at them.

Bonus question - probably not at the same price, but maybe someone else will know of something.

While the PDF is open click on the suitcase icon that allows you to make changes to how you mark up the document.

Then click on Italicized 'A' on the far right - in the drop down you can adjust size, colour and font.

Hope that helps.

I'm having this same problem with Preview 8.1. While filling out forms, Preview defaults to a blue helvetica font that cannot be adjusted by the font toolbar (side note: you can still paste in free text but that kind of eliminates the point of having a form-filling function to begin with). Whom in their right mind at Apple thought to default to scrawling on forms with something like a blue crayon is stupefying. Anyone that can figure out this issue, I would much appreciate it.

That seems to be for markup text boxes, it doesn't affect the boxes that are part of the PDF file.

Voyou_33 This is probably the best answer as we should all be upgraded by now!

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback

+1

Same problem. This behavior is just silly.

Pay for Acrobat?

Hi, looks like I have the same issue as Gil, reGunnar and fitzpatl. The suggested solution did not work for me. I am trying to post a clip from a PDF to show it. At the top it should be visible that my settings are Luminari and text color black with 12 point font. Yet, the auto fill color below (4a) is still red. What am I missing?

You might want to consider starting a new discussion. Since this one is a couple of years old and marked Solved, less people are likely to look at it. You can link to this one.