Change the highlight colour

[Lawrence]

Accordance Version: 13.1.4 September 2020

Operating System: Windows 10

 

Question: How do I change the background colour of highlighted text?

 

When I click and drag to select some text in Accordance, the system highlights the words in dark blue.

This makes the black text that it highlights almost unreadable.

 

I tried changing the highlight colour in Edit - Preferences - Text Display, but it didn't change the (background) colour of the highlighting.

 

I also tried searching in the Forum, but the search bar gave me this error message:

"The following search terms are not allowed and were removed from your query: color".

 

The forum permitted searching with "colour" (British spelling of the same word), but I didn't see any promising posts within the first 3 pages.

 

[R. Mansfield]

It's a Windows thing. Drives me crazy.

[Lawrence]

It's a Windows thing. Drives me crazy.

 

Thanks for the clue. After chasing that trail, I found what I needed in the web page

<https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/133894-change-highlighted-text-color-windows-10-a.html#:~:text=Click%2Ftap%20on%20the%20Edit,of%20the%20Edit%20Colors%20dialog.>.

 

Steps:

 

1. Get the 3 numbers representing the colour you want (RGB).

An easy way is to open Paint (mspaint.exe), go to the Home tab, select a colour, then click the "Edit colors" button on the right of the colour palette.

The Red Green Blue numbers are at the bottom-right of the resulting pop-up.

E.g. light yellow in the palette corresponds to 239 228 176.

 

2. Open regedit

Hit Win-R

Type "regedit"

Click "OK".

 

3. Select "Colors"

Scroll the left pane all the way to the left

Click into HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Colors

 

4. Enter the highlight colour

On the right pane, double-click "Hilight"

Replace the numbers with the ones you got in step 1 above.

 

5. (Optional) change the colour of highlighted text to something contrasting so you don't end up with light-on-light, which is just as bad as dark-on-dark

On the right pane, double-click "Hilight Text" and enter numbers corresponding to a contrasting colour.

With light-coloured highlighting, you can pick black (0 0 0). I used a dark grey (20 20 20).

 

6. Close regedit, save all open documents, close your applications, and logout or restart.

 

7. The highlighting should be as you set it once you log in again.

 

Note that not all highlighting follows Windows. This forum, for example, has its own highlighting colour scheme. In the long run, it might be better for Accordance to bring the colour management under user control within the application's preferences, but I understand that this is a software-architectural / user-experience choice about how far to go with adopting system defaults. In any case, my Accordance highlighting is now a lot more readable than dark-on-dark.