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Timo5FC5
Participant
May 28, 2021
Question

Pressure sensitivity in Acrobat DC

  • May 28, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 4066 views

To annotate PDFs (i.e. putting hand-written comments to papers) it is very helpful to have a clean look and feel when, as if writing on an actual paper. The current pen tool in acrobat is really weak in that sense. I appreciate this tool being available for a long time. But when you compare to the state-of-the-art Windows Ink tools (like inky, drawboard PDF,  PDF Ink, ...) or even linux tools like xournal++, the acrobat pen tool with funny renderings artifacts and without pressure sensitivity in acrobat feels really outdated. I mean really outdated. Bad looks, bad feel. In principle not acceptable.

 

This said, in Photoshop everything works as it should wrt pressure sensitivity of my pen. How difficult can it be to apply this in-house technology to a paid product like Acrobat?

 

Question: When will you please improve the inking capabilities of Acrobat DC to include pressure sensitivity, and without these funny artifacts introduced? Please do so quickly, for a paid service like acrobat dc, the current status is simply not acceptable.

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    3 replies

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    Timo5FC5Author
    Participant
    June 11, 2021

    Ok, I now switched to "PDF Annotator" which does the trick. Thanks for the support

      zediiiii
      zediiiii
      Participant
      March 4, 2023

      Still no pressure sensitivity in Acrobat. So I'll discuss some alternatives here for folks who want pressure sensitive annotations for pdfs.

       

      DrawboardPDF is amazing software -- I used it when it was a $20 purchase, but despite the fact that I purchased the program, they recently went to a "subscription only model if you want pressure sensitive ink." That left a nasty taste and I left them. Still a great experience (much better for annotating than Acrobat) for free if you don't care about pressure sensitivity -- great experience with multiple files and navigation too.

       

      PDF Annotator seems to do the job without a subscription service, about $70. Their full-screen drawing mode is great and the program supports tabs.

      Okular is free but the ink delay and recognition is terrible.

      Onenote + classroom is great if you go through the effort to set it up and use it and if you have Microsoft accounts for folks who are receiving the pdfs, otherwise it's not usable for this purpose.

      Foxit PDF Editor works well, but is pretty expensive for non-subscription options ($159+). I didn't play around with settings because I'd rather not pay that much.

      Xournal++ works pretty well for free, but you have to export the pdf to a new file every time you save or there are issues with annotations showing up in other PDF viewers. Easily the best free option I've found, though it rasterizes every page when you load (you lose all forms, layers etc).

      http://www.pdfill.com/ is $40 for the enterprise version that works but it's clunky and looks like it's from 2003 (literally, the theme is "office 2000" by default)

       

       

       

       

       

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      Timo5FC5Author
      Participant
      June 8, 2021

      Can I please request an official statement from Acrobat of when pressure-sensitive non interpolating inking is available also in Acrobat? If you do not plan to integrate it, please let me know so that I can switch my PDF editor.

      CPAlexander17583891
      CPAlexander17583891
      Participating Frequently
      May 28, 2021

      With all respect, your first sentence: "To annotate PDFs (i.e. putting hand-written comments to papers) it is very helpful to have a clean look and feel when, as if writing on an actual paper." is off the mark about using Acrobat.  It is intended for reading and review of documents in a digital world.  Using Acrobat's pen/pencil drawing tool to write text -- like writing on a physical sheet of paper -- detracts from a page's clean look and may be problematic if the writing is inadvertently moved by the recipient.  Using Acrobat's other commentary tools (highlighting, text insertion, cross-outs, etc.) and typing your remarks in those comments is very efficient.  Your commentary is also anchored to their locations.

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      Timo5FC5Author
      Participant
      May 29, 2021

      The feature of writing in PDFs, i.e. to make hand written annotations on paper work, is a feature many modern PDF viewers give. I gave examples above. I do need this feature for my work. You may not and that is OK -- but this is not the place to discuss this. For me this is a must-have feature for a modern PDF viewer/editor and Acrobat currently does not provide it despite being one of the most expensive editors on the market.

       

      Please, Adobe, make the pen tool pressure sensitive in Acrobat, too.

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