Turn-off link highlighting?

vishnu42 · May 1, 2026

Can I turn-off or change how links and hyperlinks are highlighted in PDFs?

They are currently too distracting, and also interfere with the ease of viewing search-highlights.

martynas_b · May 11, 2026

Can you make a screenshot demonstrating the issues?

vishnu42 · May 11, 2026

Sure, here is a sample. The yellow is a manual highlight, where as the blue are automatic highlights of links.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u810384/f625x8l715otvfo6jxzz.png

jeppeklitgaard · May 17, 2026

I am running into this as well, and it is particularly annoying since every exponent in my document seems to be interpretted as a link to a citation. This may be due to a fault in the generated PDF, but hiding the link highlighting would be _very_ helpful.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u3621489/4kcivkp2tk8d1lysjiaw.png

weinlafr · May 29, 2026

I am also facing this issue and it makes reading a document very hard for me without having a reading impairment. I'd imagine for someone with an impairment this is an accessability issue. I would be very greatful if you managed to fix this. In the example below there not one manual highlight. All blue highlights are automatic. For me it is more than enough, if the citations are in blue font, as usual.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u8840376/v1m7cxtbe35szdphhrgi.png

gemmanourse · June 16, 2026

I'm facing this issue too. Would love to know how to disable the blue highlighting as it's too distracting. Feel like it didn't always do this?

jilliansbaker · June 16, 2026

Toggling this on/off needs to be a feature of Zotero. I agree with a previous commenter that this is an accessibility issue and renders the documents very hard to read in the app. Please let us know when this is addressed or if there is a current fix. Thank you!

jkroes · June 23, 2026

https://github.com/jkroes/zotero-hide-citation-highlights

ND1804 · 2026-09-14T15:17:33+00:00

@jkroes, thank you, this is so helpful and improves the readability a lot

abissonn · 2026-09-16T19:16:51+00:00

@jkroes when I try to add this into my zotero plugins it doesn't work and tells me it may be incompatible with the version on zotero I'm on (10.0.2)

XuebaStudy · 2026-10-07T14:51:48+00:00

@abissonn @jkroes
For anyone using Zotero 10 and looking for a temporary solution:

I updated the existing “Hide Citation Highlights”(by jkroes) plugin to work with Zotero 10:

https://github.com/XuebaStudy/zotero10-hide-citation-highlights

It hides the automatic citation/link highlights in Zotero's PDF reader while keeping the citations clickable.

I made this mainly because the original plugin was no longer compatible with Zotero 10. Hope it helps!

txwatson · 2026-10-08T01:22:33+00:00

@XuebaStudy do you know of a version of this that removes the clickability? The problem I'm having with this feature is that I keep accidentally clicking people's names and getting jumped to the works cited and losing my place, the highlights are annoying but getting rid of them while leaving the links intact would make my problem worse.

XuebaStudy · 2026-10-10T08:09:54+00:00

@txwatson
Thanks for explaining your use case! I’ve added an optional setting in v0.3.0 to prevent those accidental jumps.

After installing the update, open Zotero Settings → Hide Citation Highlights and check “Disable citation and internal-link clicks.” It’s off by default.
When enabled, it disables citation and PDF internal-link clicks, along with their hover previews. External web links still work. You can uncheck it anytime to restore the original behavior. You can get the update here:
https://github.com/XuebaStudy/zotero10-hide-citation-highlights/releases.

I‘ve tried it on my Zotero. Let me know whether it helps!

txwatson · 2026-10-10T23:11:17+00:00

@XuebaStudy thank you so much! It works, and it's a huge help.