How do I change highlight color for Find?

Question

Level 1

8 points

How do I change highlight color for Find?

Pages 5.6.2

OS X 10.11.6

How do I change the highlight color for Find? I'm not talking about the general highlight color used when you select some text which is controlled by System Preferences. I'm talking about when you do a Find and Pages finds that text and highlights it in yellow, at least in my Pages. I regularly get documents that have text highlighted in yellow and the text highlighted by Find is often hard to recognize.

Thanks is advance!

Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Aug 25, 2016 12:57 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,398 points

Oct 8, 2017 7:21 PM in response to daveyostcom

There is the highlight/author color which can be changed to other colors And then, there is a yet another highlight color that is determined in the System Preferences : General panel, and is the background color for any selected text, whether in the Finder, Pages, or other applications.

Neither of the preceding are the same as the Find match string color which is vivid yellow, and unchangeable — which is the original post subject.

Apple is not here. This is a user-to-user support community, and telling me all of those bulleted items is the wrong forum. Use the Provide Pages Feedback menu item on the Pages application menu to share your concerns with the Pages product team.

Reply

Answer 2

Oct 8, 2017 3:33 PM in response to VikingOSX

The yellow highlighting and even the bouncing of the found item are not distinctive enough. Problems that can interfere with seeing the found item:

• the scrolling of the window to show the found word

• a full-height window on a 27-inch display

• the screen at lower brightness (for various reasons)

• the found word being at the bottom when you're looking at the top

• slight eye movement at the moment when the item is highlighted

• bleary-eyed from writing and editing all day ;-)

• disabilities

Pages should use the normal highlight color, which can be changed. Mine is Green 100% + Blue 50%.

Reply

Answer 3

Oct 8, 2017 8:19 PM in response to VikingOSX

I did.

Reply

Answer 4

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,398 points

Aug 25, 2016 2:11 PM in response to drmelzie

The found words in a Pages document are not only vivid yellow, but also raised relief, and span the white-space on either side of the found word. That makes them quite distinctive from ordinary highlighted text. This yellow Find color is baked into the application, and you cannot change it.

Reply

Answer 5

drmelzie Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 26, 2016 10:05 PM in response to VikingOSX

As I said "I regularly get documents that have text highlighted in yellow and the text highlighted by Find is often hard to recognize." This is true even with the "raised relief". If yellow is hard coded, then it shows Apple hasn't taken into consideration enough the different circumstances under which a find occurs.

Another indication how the find function has not been thought out properly is the absence of find/replace using special characters, tab, CR, etc. that was in Pages thru version 4. Copy and pasting special characters does not work.

Reply

Answer 6

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,398 points

Aug 27, 2016 6:42 AM in response to drmelzie

If you have choice words for the Pages product team, then select the Provide Pages Feedback menu item from the Pages application menu. Apple leadership and product teams do not participate in these user-to-user support communities.

All Apple applications that offer Find, use the same yellow found color and effect. It is consistently not user configurable.

No release of Pages v5 is based on Pages '09 v4.3, and there were about 100 areas of functionality that were not added back into the Pages v5 rewrite. There have been infinity comments in this community over the last three years about Apple's thought process/user requirements comprehension that created the huge feature discontinuity between v4 and v5 applications.

If you want a truly powerful find/replace, then there is always MS Word in Office 2016 for Mac.

Reply