I just noticed that the PDF highlighting colours in the PDF viewer of DT Pro don’t match in both context menu and settings. Hence, when I highlight a text via the toolbar and write an annotation, I can change the colour via context menu. However, there are fewer colour in the context menu and they differ from the ones I set in the setting. Also, “yellow” in context menu appears rather orange. Anyway, when I change the colour this way, my annotations stay intact and I try to adjust the highlighting with the matching colours and adjust all other highlight colours via toolbar.
However, when I want to change the colour of the annotated highlight via the toolbar, the colour changes as well but: my annotation gets deleted (I guess because DT treats this action as a new annotation and overwrites the current one).
I understand the necessity of this behaviour but is there a way to have the distinct selection of colours I set in the settings and be able to change the highlighting colour without losing my annotation?
The colors in the contextual menu are from PDFKit. They are not the colors set in Preferences > Colors. Use the Format > Highlight Color commands or the Highlight icon in the Editing bar above the view/edit pane…
Thank you! That’s what I usually get back to. However when i want to change a colour that way and I attached an annotation to the highlight, the annotation (my comments, ideas etc) get deleted. Is there a way to prevent this or could it be implemented in the next update?
Development would have to assess the request but note we don’t give out development timeframes nor commit to things happening on a particular release.
May I ask why you’re changing annotation colors so often?
1 Like
Thank you! And I am sorry if my wish seemed too pushy, that was not my intention. I simply assumed that it might be the matter of a quick fix. But then again, I am not a developer and gathered in the past that Apple’s PDF kit implementation got some developers (even or especially in the DEVONthink community) furious.
As to your question: Sometimes I highlight something as a claim and decide later that I would like to rather highlight it as important for my research or even disagree with it or don’t understand it properly and change the colour code for this particular part/section/sentence. Usually, I then already annotated the sentence. Or, in other cases, the highlighter is already selected for another category/colour code but I don’t want to lose the thought and highlight first, type away and then want to change the colour to the corresponding colour code.
I simply want to keep friction as low as possible especially when I’m in “the flow”.
Not pushy at all! 
Development is just too dynamic an environment and it happened all too often that people interpret estimates as quotes, comments as promises. This leads to disappointment and frustration for all involved.
However, see these older blog posts that still pertain to DEVONthink 3 (which still use all the time)
… followed by the concepts in this one _(as it’s from 2013)…
For example, I have a Highlight Orange and set up a shortcut of Control-O that applies it. I also have a Highlight Blue with Control-B. With text selected, I can hit each key and watch the highlight change and also press Shift-Command-L to remove it.
