Problem with comments from a particular user who is using Adobe Reader

​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:

1. What's the exact Reader version this particular user has (Help > About, in Reader)? And what version/type of Acrobat Pro are you on?

2. 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)?

3. 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