Change Preview Search Highlight Colour?

Is there any way to change the colour Preview uses for highlighting occurrences of Search items?

If I search for a word in a PDF, Preview highlights the found words in grey! Grey! When did anyone ever have a grey highlighter pen? If you highlight something it should be bright yellow, or green or pink, not grey!

If I could set Preview to highlight Search results in bright yellow, so that I can immediately see them, it would be a much more useful feature.

17" iMac 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 250GB Hard Drive, Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Mar 17, 2007 8:27 AM

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11 replies

Mar 17, 2007 8:45 AM in response to Reuben Feffer

Open the Appearance preference pane. You can set the system default highlight color from the Highlight color drop down menu.



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Mar 17, 2007 9:07 AM in response to Reuben Feffer

This question comes up fairly regularly - so far, I haven't seen any method to change the gray secondary highlight colour. When searching using the search field in "Preview.app", the "focus" is on the "drawer", and the main document is in the background, where highlighted items appear in gray.

At this point, tabbing a few times to switch the focus to the document should cause the highlighted term to appear in whatever primary highlight colour was selected in the "Appearance" pref pane. While keeping focus on the main document, you can cycle through other occurences of the search term using ⌘G, which should continue to display matches in the primary highlight colour.

If you were to suggest that this isn't the most effective GUI design, I wouldn't argue with you.

Mar 17, 2007 3:05 PM in response to biovizier

Ok thanks.

Yeah, so really the problem is that Preview doesn't show the true highlight colour unless you click away from the search results list and back on the document itself. It would be better if it always showed the true colour, and didn't switch to it being grey. Why does it switch to grey? How is that helpful?

Changing the Highlight Color in Appearance to Yellow kind of works, but then it also changes the highlight colour of lots of other things in OS X. I guess this is what it's supposed to do. Still, it's annoying that you can't change the highlight color JUST in Preview. Bright yellow is great for highlighting words in Preview, but it's horrible for selected folders in Finder.

Mar 17, 2007 4:25 PM in response to Reuben Feffer

..." it's annoying that you can't change the highlight color JUST in Preview."...

Actually, the highlight colour is one that can be set app by app. Try opening "/Applications" > "Utilities" > "Terminal.app" and entering something along the lines of:<pre>defaults write com.apple.Preview AppleHighlightColor 'r g b'</pre>Each digit of the rgb values can range from 0 to 1. The change should be in effect the next time "Preview.app" is launched.

For example, you could set the highlight colour in the "Appearance" pref pane, then use this command to find out what values correspond to that colour:<pre>defaults read -g AppleHighlightColor</pre>Then substitute those values in the first command. Once "Preview.app" has its own colour setting, the general highlight can be switched to something else in the "Appearance" pref pane, and "Preview.app" should retain its own custom setting.

May 15, 2007 8:25 AM in response to biovizier

At this point, tabbing a few times to switch the
focus to the document should cause the highlighted
term to appear in whatever primary highlight colour
was selected in the "Appearance" pref pane. While
keeping focus on the main document, you can cycle
through other occurences of the search term using ⌘G,
which should continue to display matches in the
primary highlight colour.

If you were to suggest that this isn't the most
effective GUI design, I wouldn't argue with you.


There are a bunch of posts on this topic, and this is the only effective answer I've seen (other than the day Apple decides it makes sense to highlight the search results from the attached drawer). Perhaps I should send them a few sample documents, so they can see how hard it is to see the shaded grey on the page.

I've learned to use biovizier's suggestion (using the tab to change focus).
Found I can type the "TAB" 12 times (yes twelve), or I can type "Shift+TAB" 2 times.

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Change Preview Search Highlight Colour?

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