Abstract
The need of using text highlighting techniques exists in various cases. There are numerous different techniques available, among others: font colour, background colour, underlining, font weight, font style or capitalization. The guidelines describing the usage of colours in different contexts can be found in many sources. Over the last century studies in this field have been conducted but the impact of colours on the pop-out effect has not been comprehensively investigated so far. The present study analyzes that phenomenon and establishes preliminary ranking of best colours to use for text highlighting basing on opinions of 82 students. Two highlighting methods: text colour and background colour, with six basic colours: red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow, have been examined. The results show that significant differences between colours exist. The stability of answers has been confirmed but some of the data is inconsistent. Limitations as well as directions for future work are also described.
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