Acrobat Pro DC Highlighting feature is useless

[JJG-519]

The Acrobat Pro DC highlighting feature is useless.  Acrobat thinks it is smarter than I am and it will not allow me to highlight precise areas of a document that need to be highlighted.  I am a professional who uses documents constantly for my profession.  That is why I paid for Pro DC.  This highlighting tool is useless.  It is not suitable for amateurs or middle school students.  The support for it is worse.  Garbage! Shame! 

[try67]

Use the Square tool.

[Document Geek]

Unfortnately, the square tool doesn't "highlight." You can reduce the opacity, but then it obscures the text. You can also just do an outline, but then it's nit a highlight. I asked for the drawing tools to be able to be used as highlighters, and it was turned down. https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/18813292-use-the...

That post above on User Voice can no longer be vited for, but you can add comments if you like.

[try67]

Yes, it uses a different blending option, and you're limited to a rectangle shape when using the Square tool, but it's a very slight difference.

[JJG-519]

Thank you for the input - I would certainly be willing to try the Square tool but I do not know what it is.  Could you please describe that tool in a little more detail?  Thank you!

[try67]

It's one of the Commenting tools. You'll find it under the Comment panel, Drawing Markups.

[Bernd Alheit]

What is your problem with the highlight tool?

[JJG-519]

My problem is as I described it:  I am not able to highlight the precise parts of the document that I wish to highlight.  This is true for documents that I use in Adobe Acrobat Pro.  This is true especially for scanned/OCR documents but it is also true for documents converted from Word or Excel that have images in them or any document at all that has hand-written text.  The highlighting tool is USELESS.  Do you have a different experience?  Do you think I'm not using the highlighting tool correctly?  Are there settings that can be adjusted that I am not aware of?  I have searched for solutions on this forum and the internet and I have consistently run into dead ends.  Your assistance would be very much appreciated if you can provide any.   Thank you! 

[Document Geek]

Try running OCR on the document first. That may make highlighting easier. Also this may help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_LhNl1Jw0w&t=27s

[JJG-519]

The original portion of the video would be a great solution but can you explain why that is not available on all documents?  It is not available on scanned/OCR'd documents and documents converted from Word/Excel that have images and/or hand writing on them.  The end of the video explains the problem: the highlighting tool in Acrobat Pro DC thinks it is smarter than the user and it only higlights recognized text a certain way.  It also does not allow the user to draw a highlight onto an OCR document like it does for a scanned document.  I suppose the solution is to print the documents on paper and then rescan all paper documents as non-OCR documents, then use the highlighter tool, then try to recognize text.  That solution is ridiculously labor-intensive, cumbersome and unnecessarily redundant.  I go back to my original point: the highlighting tool in Acrobat Pro DC is USELESS.  

[Document Geek]

Here are a couple articles that might be of interest. They're different ways I've highlighted things in Acrobat. Neither of these involve using the actual highlighter tool.

http://documentgeek.blogspot.com/2009/07/highlighting-pdf-that-contains-no-fonts.html

http://documentgeek.blogspot.com/2016/12/number-knitting-4-virtual-coloring-in.html

[kharakim]

My experience is pretty much the same as yours, under pretty much the same conditions. The truly aggravating part is that Adobe apps aren't cheap and the support is virtually non-existent. On my ARM-based iMac and Macbook Air, both running Acrobat Pro 2020 on the Mac OS (12.1) and Win 11 (via Parallels VR), none of these iterations of Acrobat will allow simple highlighting like the earlier versions that run on my Intel-based machines. The highlighting produces an overly wide brush stroke that can highlight only one line at a time and, if not precisely centered on the line, prevents highlighting the next line. Actually, it's not agravating, it's infurating, because it throws a serious monkey-wrench into my everyday professional work. Maybe all the latest features in these versions of bloatware are valuable to a lot of users, but I have no use for 90 percent of what's been added since my much earlier X and XI versions. Right now I'm looking for alternative pdf software, which in the past was available from Nuance.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

The Highlighting tool is for text only--not for images. This includes scanned text (unless you run it through the OCR). 

As Try67 suggested, check out the other commenting tools. 

[JR Boulay]

The Highlight tool is not "text only", it works fine on images and/or on blank parts of any PDF document.

You can use it for drawing if you like.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Thank you, JR. I forgot about that. I'm going to blame lack of coffee...

Since the OP was about precision, I would, however, use it only for text. I like the other tools for more precision. 

[JR Boulay]

It was true but it is no longer.

If I remember correctly it was one of the new features of Acrobat DC.

😉

[JR Boulay]

It can also  easily highlight multiple lines at once.