I recently gave the annotations feature (the one in the Annotations & Reminders inspector) another try and was delighted to discover it suited my needs perfectly. Now I can replace my usage of PDF annotation features with this altogether and no longer have to deal with read-only PDFs that cannot be highlighted thanks to the bugs Apple won’t fix.
There is only one thing I wish could be improved. I color-coded the highlighting colors (in DT Settings > Colors > Highlighting) and used this system extensively to highlight PDFs. When I’m using rich text annotations now, I would like to apply the same colors to the annotations added via “insert quote”, but it’s cumbersome to do so within the inspector because the context menu is nested too deep:Quick edit: I just realized the two screenshots below are options for changing the text colors, not highlighting colors. Unless I’m mistaken, you cannot apply highlights at all to rich text annotations within the inspector pane.
And even after clicking “Show Colors”, you can’t really select the preset colors in DT Settings > Colors > Highlighting, but have to use the system color picker instead:
My feature request is to have the “Highlight” menu show up in the context menu within the inspector pane, so that users can apply color easily without having to open the annotation file in its own window:
Thanks for the suggestion! While the contextual menu does not support this, the commands & shortcuts of the Format menu (e.g. highlighting) are already supported.
Thanks for the helpful reply, Christian! I totally forgot about the Format menu, and it is certainly much more convenient for me than opening the annotation file in another window!
By the way, you can create your own shortcut keys to assign highlights.
It can be useful to make sure your Colors names are unique in the Settings > Colors, i.e. you don’t have both label and highlight colors named Red.
Go into System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, press the plus (+) button, and add the exact color name.
Add the shortcut key you want to press, bearing in mind you want to avoid a collision with existing hotkeys. Something with the function keys or extended punctuation, like [ or > may work.
In DEVONthink, open the Format > Highlight Color menu to verify the shortcut is applied.
Select text in your document, press your hotkeys, and the highlight should be applied.
Note, this changes the highlight color. So you press the shortcut to change the color, then press Shift-Command-L to apply it.
Thank you for the detailed guide, Jim! I was just wondering if I assign shortcuts to make things even easier than going through the Format menu each time I want to switch colors. On my way to setting things up right now!
