Overlapping highlight annotations look darker

b0c5
edited January 2, 2024
If I highlight two nearby lines of text, the highlights overlap producing a darker color which can sometimes make the highlighted text harder to read.

It seems that the opacity value of overlapping highlights colors, is simply being summed.

I think it would be nicer if overlapping highlights did not sum their opacities, but rather the opacity should just stay the same.
  • adamsmith
    No, you need to be able to tell that/where there are overlapping annotations; this is standard behavior in PDF readers and annotation tools in general.
  • b0c5
    Why?

    Consider this example: https://ibb.co/pW7zH1n

    Here the highlights of consecutive lines are overlapping, simply because the lines are too close to each other (or the highlight stroke width is too large). Visually it looks harder to read, IMHO.
  • adamsmith
    edited January 2, 2024
    That's a different issue, though -- those annotations just shouldn't be overlapping and you don't intend them to. Not sure how easy that's to fix, one of the devs would have to say.

    edit: I might have also misread the first comment -- in any case: if you annotate the same section multiple times, that needs to look darker to show that. Adjacent lines that are only annotated once each shouldn't show any overlap.
  • b0c5
    edited January 2, 2024
    Some apps that behaves differently here are Notability (https://notability.com) and Goodnotes (https://www.goodnotes.com). Admittedly these apps serve a quite different purpose (taking notes on tablets with a stylus), but they also can be used to read and annotate PDFs.

    In both Goodnotes and Notability, if you highlight the same area twice, the highlight does not get darker. This seems like a more useful behavior to me.
  • b0c5
    Re: Adjacent lines.

    The example I posted above is quite common to me. I very frequently encounter papers where adjacent lines are so close that highlighting a paragraph produces many of these darker overlaps, which makes the text unpleasant to read.
  • warwickmm
    Somewhat related:

    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/103896/inconsistent-opacity-within-highlight
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