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Participant
Feb 23, 2022 4:41 PM UTC
Answered

Keyboard shortcuts ONLY strikethrough (won't highlight)

I'm a grad student and would love be able to use shortcuts to simply highlight PDFs and annotate them in the comments sidebar. My "single-key accelorators" option is turned on, however when I ue the cursor to highlight text and press "u" the text is struck through, ALWAYS, and never highlighted. Shift + u performs identically—it doesn't cycle through annotation options, it ONLY strikes throught text. If I press "u" and attempt to highlight, the automatic response of the program is "insert text."

 

Can somebody PLEASE help my configure the program to simply... highlight? This is the bane of my reading existence and I know other users have encountered this issue, too, without resolution. 

 

Many, many thanks.

robert_5621Correct answer
Participant
Oct 10, 2025 7:38 PM UTC

Also a grad student with the same issue. Thanks for clarifying this.

 

The shortcuts help page https://helpx.adobe.com/in/acrobat/using/keyboard-shortcuts.html should be made much more clear in terms of the order of operations. Given the way its works without keyboard shortcuts -- select text with mouse, right click, then highlight -- when I read the instructions I assumed I would highlight the text and then press "h" or "Shift+h" to highlight.

4 replies

Participant
Jan 6, 2025 2:26 PM UTC

For anyone else who has made the same mistake, the single-key accelerator shortcuts 'U' and 'Ctrl+U' only cycle between the different highlight tools. You should make sure nothing is selected before using the shortcut, then highlight text with the cursor as normal. It is not the behaviour you would except from Word or other similar program.

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Participant
Jan 13, 2025 8:10 PM UTC

THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS!!!

 

I hate that the behaviour isn't intuitive and I had to do a lot of searching before finally finding this comment from a 3 year old thread. Everything else just says use U or Shift+U, but doesn't explain that it should be before selecting the text. Adobe should have non-tech savvy people testing the UI/UX because even I, a seasoned millennial, was about to lose my mind over something so simple.

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Participant
Jan 6, 2025 2:20 PM UTC

Upvote

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