10.5 · Settings and Preferences

Annotation Settings

Defaults for the annotation canvas and the shared recent-colours palette.

Settings

Setting	Default	Description	UI location
`DefaultPenColor`	`#FF0000`	Initial colour for Pen, Marker, shapes, arrows, and text	Settings → Annotation
`DefaultHighlightColor`	`#FFFF00`	Initial colour for the Highlighter tool	Settings → Annotation
`DefaultThickness`	`3`	Stroke thickness in pixels for pen and shape outlines	Settings → Annotation
`DefaultOpacity`	`1.0`	Opacity for pen / shape strokes. Range 0.0-1.0	Settings → Annotation
`HighlightOpacity`	`0.4`	Opacity for the Highlighter tool only. Range 0.0-1.0	Settings → Annotation
`BlurRadius`	`10`	Gaussian blur radius in pixels for the Blur tool	Settings → Annotation
`PixelateSize`	`10`	Block size in pixels for the Pixelate tool	Settings → Annotation
`RecentColors`	`[]`	Array of recently used hex colours (up to 10). Managed automatically	Settings → Annotation (read-only swatches)

Recent colours

RecentColors is a shared palette used by two features:

The Color Picker utility — every confirmed pick (click, not hover) is pushed to the front of the list.
The annotation color selector — every colour chosen from the inline picker is pushed to the front.

The list is deduplicated (a repeat click moves the colour to the front instead of adding a duplicate) and capped at 10 entries. When the list is full, the oldest entry is dropped.

Tip

Tip — To seed a brand palette, edit RecentColors in settings.json directly while Tex is closed. Entries must be 6-digit hex with a leading #, e.g. "#2E86AB".

Tool defaults

DefaultPenColor is re-applied each time you switch to a pen-family tool after Tex launch. Changes made during a session persist until restart only.
HighlightOpacity intentionally overrides DefaultOpacity so highlighters stay translucent even when the opacity slider sits at 100%.
BlurRadius and PixelateSize are applied at the moment the tool is used — increasing them later does not affect prior annotations.

Tip

Warning — Setting PixelateSize below 4 on a high-DPI display produces blocks too small to obscure text. Stay at 8 or above for redaction work.