Change font size for PDF Text comments in Preview

Solution 1:

I figured it out. Download the tinker tool, then go to fonts and increase the size of the help tag and you're golden. The size of the notes in the preview will increase to 24. Relaunch preview to see the change. You can even delete the tinker tool after the setting is changed. The change in font size will remain. :) –

Solution 2:

You have to use defaults write in a slightly differently way with Preview and other sandboxed apps.

Using defaults write com.apple.Preview ... modifies (or creates) a plist file in ~/Library/Preferences.

As pointed out, that's not where Preview saves (or looks for) its preference file, which is in a nested subfolder of ~/Library/Containers instead.

To modify the correct plist, use: defaults write -app Preview ...

You'll need to make sure you have the correct key, too. I have the following keys in my Preview plist:

"PVAnnotationFontSize_12" = 10;
"PVAnnotationFontSize_17" = 10;
"PVAnnotationFontSize_5" = "11.99199";
"PVAnnotationFontSize_6" = 10;

However, modifying those does not change the text size for either Annotations or Notes. Annotations seem to keep the last settings used. Notes don't seem to be editable in the UI.

Also, note that you don't need to use grep to read a specific plist key. E.g. defaults read com.apple.Preview PVAnnotationFontSize_5

EDIT: Having probed into the plist data and the text strings within the Preview app itself, I'm not convinced that there is an editable key for the font size or style in Preview's Notes.