Icons for PDF annotations need to pop out with high visibility so you can see them stand apart from the main content. So PDFs often specify colors like bright yellow, fuschia, or dark blue. This is sensible. But then in Okular clicking on the annotation icon results in a pop-up note that uses that same foreground color of the icon as the background of the note with black text on top of it. It’s horrible for reading the text.

I produced a PDF using LaTeX and the pdfcomment package. I specified no color, as I do not want to control or dictate to readers what color is used. So it’s left to the viewer to choose sensible colors. Okular chose dark blue for the icon (good). But then when expanding the icon we have black text on a dark blue background. This is a terrible default.

There is some mention somewhere that Okular colors can be changed in a Qt config tool of some kind, but the problem is that the color of the icon and the color of the note’s background is the same configuration setting.

Or am I missing something?

Update: If you click on a pop-up annotation, the color is unreadable. But if you hover over the icon, the popup has a reasonable light gray background. Hovering does not always work though.. it doesn’t seem to sense the mouse position, depending on what the last action was.