How to Change the Highlight Color in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC

Sometimes Adobe Acrobat Reader DC takes a lot of trouble to hinder productivity. Last time, we talked about how to deal with the constantly annoying Tools pane and ways to get rid of the unintuitive tabbed view in its place. And today, let’s take a closer look at another topic, the highlighting tool.

Stick with the highlighter for a while and it seems that Acrobat Reader DC doesn’t offer an option to change the default color. But thankfully, that’s not the case. In fact, there are several ways to change highlighter colors – it’s just that Adobe has unnecessarily put them in places where no one will bother to look.

Highlight Properties Dialog Box

Let’s start by looking at a method to change the color of your highlights after you’ve already applied them. Right click on the highlighted portion of the text and then select Properties – this should load the Highlight Properties dialog.

Fly:

Under the Appearance tab, use the color picker to switch to another color. There is also a slider to change the opacity level of the selected color.

You can also set a default color when you’re ready – check the box next to Set Properties to Default.

Click OK and the new color should immediately replace the old one in the highlighted text. Also, if you’ve checked the Make Properties Default box, you can use the same color for subsequent highlights you perform.

Highlighter Tool Properties Toolbar

The above method is not very convenient when it comes to changing colors in real time. Fortunately, there is a faster and better way, which involves using the Ctrl+E shortcut to bring up the Highlighter Tool Properties toolbar.

Note:

This nifty toolbar stays open no matter what, and you can easily move it anywhere on the screen. It consists of a palette for easily pre-selecting colors, as well as a drop-down menu to change the opacity, which makes customizing the colors very easy.

And if that wasn’t enough, the toolbar also ensures that the highlighter toolset is always selected, which is actually very helpful when performing quick highlights on text-heavy PDF documents.

The Opacity menu includes five presets and is much faster to use, although it doesn’t provide the level of accuracy found in the Highlight Properties dialog.

Then any color you choose will become the default accent color even if you exit and restart the app. Given that the toolbar can be toggled on and off on the fly, switching between colors and going crazy with your highlights is more than possible.

You can forgive Adobe even after messing around with this toolbar for a while – yes, it’s that good.

Comment Mode Color Picker

There is another way to change highlight colors on the fly, and that involves switching to Comment mode. However, you lose screen real estate due to the additional toolbar and side pane that appear later. However, you can hide the latter.

Click View in the menu bar to enable comment mode. Then hover over Tools, select Comment, then click Open.

Use the color picker in the new toolbar to change colors and then continue using the highlight tool. Any color you choose becomes the default until you switch to another color.

Similar to the floating toolbar we mentioned earlier, you can keep the highlight tool selected by clicking the pin-shaped icon. Don’t forget to use the opacity slider to further customize the colors.

Note:

Highlight Color in iOS Version

While Adobe Acrobat Reader DC on Android provides a highlight color picker directly inside the UI, the iOS version isn’t that compatible. But changing the color is pretty simple if you know how.

Start by tapping a highlighted word or phrase. In the menu that appears, tap Color to bring up the color picker.

Any color you choose replaces the current color and also defaults to the highlights below.

You can also change the opacity of the color by tapping the Opacity option. And if you want to change it later, it will remain your default opacity level.

Again, this is not a very convenient method if you want to change colors regularly. But unfortunately, this is something you have to deal with.

Paint Them Right

Adobe Acrobat Reader DC is an excellent application for reading and marking up PDFs, but its user interface design can be tedious. You really shouldn’t look around to do something so trivial, right? We hope that Adobe has truly taken these issues into account and made the necessary improvements in future iterations.

Now that you know several ways to change the color of highlighter, what is your preferred method? Floating toolbar? Let us know in the comment section below.