Excursus

When generating PDFs with PDFLaTeX or XeTeX, I use the hyperref package which adds some nice functionality to the compiled document. So, for example, citations are linked to the bibligography and if you use the backref option there’s a link back to the page with the orignal citation. Nice and user-friendly. The other day I realized, however, that this functionality is largely hidden, since the links are uncolored. The hyperref package comes with a color option, but the default settings for colorlonks=true are, well, garish. Here’s a screenshot of the bright green with which citations are colored:

The problem is not, or not solely, aesthetic—the coloring degrades readability. Fortunately, the default color settings can be overidden with the help of the color package. I wanted the difference to be discernable but not distracting. So I opted for a shade of gray:

Unfortunately color selection in LaTeX is tedious and requires knowledge of the LaTeX color system that I lack. Fortunately, for OS X users, Maarten Sneep has written a nice color picker, LaTeXColorSelector. Using the operating system’s color selection, it outputs LaTeX color definitions in rgb and cmyk. A nice hybrid app.