Known Participant

Question

Highlight comments missing from Comment Summary for one user's annotations only

Forum|Forum|12 days ago
August 21, 2026
6 replies
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I have a problem with comments from a particular user who is using Adobe Reader. Their comment (highlighted text on the page and the comment text keyed into the pop-up) shows up in my Acrobat Pro but when I create the Comment Summary the highlights on the page this user has made does not show, even though the comment text they have keyed does. For example they have highlighted a word on the page using the Highlight tool and then keyed in the correct spelling in the pop-up box - when I create the Comment Summary PDF I choose “Documents and comments with connector lines on single pages” and the text the user has typed shows up with a connecting line to the spot on the page but the word it is referring to is not highlighted. When there are a lot of comments the extra time spent looking for exactly which word they are pointing to is a problem.

When I recreate what this user is doing comments I add in Adobe Reader do show correctly in the Comment Summary. I don’t know what I can tell this user to do differently so we get our comments summary as expected. Both Adobe Readers are the latest versions.

Any help gratefully received.

TIA

Iain

Iain RobinsonAuthor

Known Participant

Thank you

Iain RobinsonAuthor

Known Participant

Hi Amal

Thanks for your time.

1. I have right-clicked one of the problem comments in our Reader and in the General tab I don’t see a Type field. See screenshot below.

2. The commented PDF was transferred to us via WeTransfer. Although it was commented on by at least two people and I don’t know how they transferred it between themselves. I have attached a zipped version of the .xfdf file. I did look at a .fdf file of the comments previously and could see the ones that didn’t work were different to the ones that did work but that didn’t help me.

In the .xfdf file the first two comments (“Cap K” and “invert to - 'family and career'”) don’t work and the third (“Is it possible to have this word...”) does. And by not working I mean that when I create the Comment Summary PDF I choose “Documents and comments with connector lines on single pages” and the text the user has typed shows up with a connecting line to the spot on the page but the word(s) it is referring to is not highlighted like it should be.

Thanks,

Iain

02_Tringham ET and NT and CW.zip

Meenakshi0101

Community Manager

Hi Iain Robinson,

Thank you for sharing the information.

Please allow us some time to review this file, and we will get back with our findings.

Thanks,

Meenaksh

Amal Jaiswal

Community Manager

Hi @Iain Robinson,

Hope you are doing well, and thanks for reaching out. We are sorry for the trouble you are experiencing.

A couple of things would help narrow this down:

What's the exact Reader version this particular user has (Help > About, in Reader)? And what version/type of Acrobat Pro are you on?
When this user highlights text, are they using the Highlight tool from the Comment toolbar, or something else (like a browser-based PDF viewer, a tablet app, or a different annotation tool)?
Was this PDF specifically "Reader-enabled" (Extended Features) so this user can comment in the free Reader, or is it a shared review file?

Here's what's likely going on:

Highlight annotations are drawn from a set of coordinates that mark where the highlight sits on the page. Most of the time, Acrobat also saves a matching visual "appearance" alongside that. If that appearance is missing or malformed on a specific comment, Acrobat's live viewer is often smart enough to redraw the highlight anyway, so it looks fine when you open the file normally. But Create Comment Summary generates a brand-new document, and it seems to rely more strictly on that saved appearance. If it's missing, the summary can show the connector line and comment text, but skip the highlight itself. That would explain why it's fine in Acrobat Pro directly, breaks only in the summary, and only for this one user's comments.

A few things to try:

Ask the user to update Reader to the latest release, in case this is tied to a build that handles highlight appearances differently.
Have them right-click one of their highlights and check Properties to confirm it's genuinely listed as a Highlight, not a different markup type. General background on the commenting tools and how they behave is here: View, reply, print comments in Adobe Acrobat.
On your end, try switching to the classic interface before regenerating the summary. Steps are here: Learn about the new Acrobat (there's a "revert to previous experience" section with the Disable New Acrobat steps for Windows and Mac).
For reference, the general steps for generating the summary itself (in case any option is set differently than expected) are in Print comments | Adobe Acrobat, Reader.

If none of that shows any difference, please share a small video recording of the steps you are taking and the issue as it occurs, along with the sample files, so we can get these checked with our development team.

~Amal

Iain RobinsonAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for your reply Amal.

To answer your questions;

1. I’m not sure the exact version of Reader they are using but they have said they are using “the latest version (I checked a couple of weeks ago to edit something else)”. Looks like they are using the “new Acrobat” interface. I am using “Continuous Release | Version 2026.001.21789 | 64-bit”.

2. They sent a picture (below) of how they were applying the comments we were having issues with. Looks like they are using the Highlight tool as you described.

3. The PDF was exported directly from Adobe Indesign and the Extended Features have not been turned on. None of our PDFs that we send out like this have these features turned on and we rarely see problems like I am describing - it has happened before but not consistently.

Regarding the things to try;

I haven’t asked the user yet to update as they said they were fully up-to-date as of a couple of weeks ago.
I right-clicked one of their comments (NB other comments have been added to this PDF by other users using Google Docs) in my fully up-to-date Reader and the resulting window is titled Highlight Properties. However I did notice something. I added a highlight comment to a test PDF in my Adobe Reader and if I look at the Properties of that, in the General tab the Subject: field says Highlight. If I do the same to one of the comments I’m having trouble with the Subject: field is blank.
I use the old/classic Acrobat interface by default but I have toggled on the new interface and generated the comments summary again with the same results.
The link you posted to describe “Print comments” did not work for me.

Many thanks,

Iain

Amal Jaiswal

Community Manager

Hi @Iain Robinson ,

Thanks for all that extra detail, and that blank Subject field you found is a good lead worth chasing.

A couple more things that would help narrow this down:

1. Could you ask them to right-click one of the problem comments, open Properties, and look at the General tab again, but this time check the "Type" field (not just Subject). Does it say "Highlight," or something else? That'll tell us whether Acrobat is actually treating it as a different kind of markup under the hood, even though it looks like a highlight on screen.

2. How is the PDF traveling between you two? Is it a plain file sent back and forth by email, or is it part of a shared/cloud review (a link through Adobe Document Cloud, for example)? If the Type field also comes back odd, it's worth exporting just that user's comments to a data file (Options menu in the Comments list > Export All to Data File, saved as .xfdf) and taking a look, or sharing it here, that file is just XML, so a blank Subject would be visible in the raw text. Here's how to do that: https://adobe.ly/3Uf3lA8

If it still doesn’t work and given everything you've already ruled out, could you please share a small video recording of the steps you are taking and the issue as it occurs, along with the sample PDF file, so we can check it at our end.

~Amal

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