How to stop the highlight function from "bleeding" to adjacent space/word?

[philips97223204]

Whenever a user highlights text in Reader, the highlight automatically "bleeds" beyond the user's selected text and covers the adjacent space/character or it grabs and highlights an entire word when the user is trying to highlight only part of that word.  HOW IS THIS USER-FRIENDLY???  What possible user benefit is there to have Acrobat automatically include parts of text that user did not select to highlight???  The highlight function should (as it easily could) ONLY highlight the text that the user actually selects ... the software should not automatically take it upon itself to "stretch" to highlight a punctuation mark following the selected text or grab an entire word when the user only wanted to highlight part of the word.

For example (using bold blue text to represent highlighted text):

I select the text below:   >>>  and it automatically bleeds to:

How was your day?              How was your day?

(question mark not selected)                 (question mark auto-selected)

I select the word part below:   >>>  and it automatically grabs the whole word:

Inconcievable                                  Inconcievable

(misspelled part selected)                                (entire word auto-selected)

Is there a setting to improve the accuracy (deactivate the "bleed") of the highlight function?  If there is not such an accuracy-adjustment setting (I couldn't find one), then Adobe had better fix this obnoxious, preposterous user experience design decision ... it may be "cute" to emulate the effect of highlighter ink soaking into paper and bleeding a bit beyond where the pen holder marked the paper, BUT this is a digital medium, and there is no technical reason or design excuse for not allowing the user to highlight precisely the text he/she wants to highlight!, at the character level, without auto-bleeding!!!  I cannot believe the arrogance of the UX designers in disregarding user convenience and efficiency in favor of some visual gimmick.

To add insult to frustration, Adobe provides no simple contact interface to alert Adobe product managers/designers to bugs and flaws in the software ... one has to be a paid user, which makes no sense, I can understand why Adobe does not want to give away free tech support, but what a simple message input just for trouble reporting?  Again, such arrogance ... does Adobe really believe their products are flawless?  And why should I pay to alert Adobe about their own product flaws which, in this case for me, is the reason I stopped being a paid user?

I hope someone at Adobe with ability to investigate and correct this garish user experience gaffe will actually see this, and will do something to correct it.

[try67 · Accepted solution]

Are you using Acrobat or the free Reader? And what version? As a general rule Adobe doesn't provide support for free applications, like Reader.

What you're describing is certainly not how it should work, or how it works (from my experience, at least).

It's true that when you start to highlight a word it will automatically "jump" to the end of that word, but you can certainly move the mouse back and select exactly which characters to highlight, and which ones not to.

The only such limitation I can find is when you start highlighting from the middle of a word and reach the next one the highlight will automatically "jump" backwards and include the start of the next word. But if you move backwards it reverts to your original starting point. Not ideal (although I can see the logic behind it), but it does allow you to make a partial selection, if you wish to.