Can Mountain Lion's Preview.app be configured to use Lion's highlighting colours? The highlight function in the Mountain Lion version of Preview.app is now directly accessible from the toolbar, while the other annotation functions keep their usual location. The problem is that Apple reduced the number of colours for the highlighting function. For example, red and orange are missing. The number of colours stays the same for the other annotation functions.

I work with scientific articles on a daily basis and the highlighting function is my main tool. I really need all the colours that were available since Apple introduced PDF highlighting several years ago, because I follow a colour scheme to quickly distinguish different parts of an article. I do not understand why they removed these colours, It's not like a few menu items were bloating the software. At least one other person is in my case: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1416813

I tried reverting to Lion's Preview.app, but Apple has disabled Lion's applications on ML and I get an error message when I try to open it. In the past, one could run SL's Preview.app on Lion in order to circumvent the "highlights fading bug".

Therefore, I'm looking for either one of two solutions:


getting all the colours back in the highlighting function;
or getting Lion's Preview.app to run on ML.


(Skim is not a solution because it stores the highlights in another file and I need my PDFs to be transportable.)
You can reinstall and use the version of Preview.app from Lion.

Instructions are here (start with post #8 and move forward from there)
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1412516

Here are some of the salient parts, in case the link breaks. I'm just quoting text from the poster on the linked thread:


  The Lion Preview.app seems to be blacklisted in ML through the "Bundle
  version=719.25" entry in the Info.plist. So I changed it to something
  higher (760 in this case - 765 is the version-number from ML
  Preview.app). Now the app fails to start, because modifying the
  plist-file apparently broke the signing. Then I resigned it using this
  command: 

codesign --force --sign - Preview.app/Contents/MacOS/Preview



The linked post also contains a link to a downloadable version of Lion Preview that has presumably been modified as described. I have downloaded it and it works perfectly.