878812 - PDF Viewer's search highlight contrast color should be higher

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: PDF Viewer, defect, P3)

Description

[Doug Hockin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130511120803

Steps to reproduce:

Open a PDF document and search for a text string.

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1210/1210.6844.pdf


Actual results:

The highlight color does not contrast enough with the background.


Expected results:

Highlight color should be more intense, or user configurable.

Comment 1

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Could we use the same colors Firefox is using?

Comment 2

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Attachment: Firefox highlight colors

Comment 3

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Attachment: PDF.js highlight colors

Comment 4

[Doug Hockin]

I reported this seven years ago. I'd forgotten about it. Firefox and PDF viewer use the same colors, they're just different hues or intensities (whatever the right word is). I find that today I actually like the PDF viewer ones better, the Firefox ones seem way too in-your-face. Since I never thought to provide any samples originally it makes me wonder if the colors haven't changed since then, but maybe my color preferences have just changed?

I notice that the double click text selection colors are also different (between Firefox and PDF viewer). In PDF viewer all three highlight colors are softer, whereas the Firefox ones are two intense search colors and a less intense text selection highlight.

They behave differently as well, if you've searched for a string and are incrementing through the hits, and then select a word nearby with a double click on it. In Firefox as soon as you double click to select a word the currently focused search result instance changes from green to purple and the selected word is soft green - two colors. In PDF viewer the word selection double click has no affect on the search highlights, you have three highlight colors visible.

Comment 5

[Calixte Denizet (:calixte)]

In Firefox, the text color is changed when it's selected to increase the contrast between text and background.
For pdf it's a bit different, the text is rendered on a canvas and to make it selectable it exists (as text) in a div (the text layer), so changing the font color would imply to partially redraw the canvas with a different color for the selected text.
That said, I think it's a real problem in HCM because there isn't enough contrast between text and background.
Anyway thanks to the patch in bug 1790309, we now use a color depending on a user setting so it's likely better than before but as said it's still buggy when in HCM.

Comment 6

[Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan]]

:calixte do you have a screenshot of what it looks like with HCM on?
also, do you know if the color we use here is read from a config pref or if it's hard coded?

Comment 7

[Calixte Denizet (:calixte)]

Attachment: HCM, dusk theme (Windows 11), colors for text selection don't contrast enough

The background color for selected text doesn't really contrast with the page background color and the color of the text should be white.

Comment 8

[Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan]]

With HCM on, we should be using the selection colors in the HCM palette to style selection. On dusk, it looks like we might be using the right background blue but not the right text color. I'll attach the palette.

Comment 9

[Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan]]

Attachment: hcm dusk palette

Comment 10

[444jondoh]

(In reply to Morgan Reschenberg [:morgan] from comment #9)
How do you even get to the accessibility settings? Also, how are you all showing ANY color at all in the pdf viewer? I'm convinced this has to do with stupid dark mode because I don't use it so it's probably highlighting in white which matches the color of my background.

In any case, how do you even get to the accessibility settings? I go into firefox settings and search for accessibility and literally nothing is found.

Comment 11

[444jondoh]

Never mind. I guess that's a Windows specific setting.