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N
nur development
Known Participant
September 15, 2020
Question

Commenting with the Surface Pen is distorted and ugly compared to other PDF apps

  • September 15, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 3055 views

Please compare the pen commenting mark-ups between the apps. Drawboard PDF is so much smoother and nicer than Adobe. I switch to Drawboard just to mark-up a PDF for my clients. Why does Adobe spike letters and generally distort the writing? How can it get fixed?

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    3 replies

    G
    George_Johnson
    Inspiring
    October 2, 2020

    There's a trial version of the AutoInk plug-in that you can try out to see if it makes any difference: https://www.evermap.com/autoink.asp

      N
      nur developmentAuthor
      Known Participant
      October 19, 2020

      This is helpful. I tried it out and it's a bit better. You can see Adobe pen smoothening function coming in after some annotations and skewing the letters for the worse. What was more helpful was seeing the AutoInk plug-in website which explained that the Adobe Acrobat Pencil tool is designed for the mouse and not updated for Apple Pencil or Microsoft Surface Pen, hence the unnatural and skewed look.

       

      So it doesn't appear to be a local issue but rather an Acrobat issue. Which sort of shocks me that Acrobat wouldn't have better pencil annotation support!

        М
        моника3358059039yo
        Participant
        November 13, 2023

        The same here, so disapointed 😕😕 Will you fix this?

        A
        Adobe Employee
        arvindy
        Adobe Employee
        September 17, 2020

        Hello,

        Pen commenting mark-ups get smoothen by default.

        Could you please create a registry to disable this the smoothening and see if it helps?

        Please follow the steps to do that-

        - Close Acrobat if already running

        - Create registry "bDisablePenToolSmoothening" and set it to 1, complete path of the registry dword for Acrobat DC is:

           [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\AVGeneral]
               "bDisablePenToolSmoothening"=dword:00000001

        - Now try using pencil tool and see if smoothening is disabled.

         

        Regards,
        Arvind

          N
          nur developmentAuthor
          Known Participant
          October 2, 2020

          Disabling smoothing via the registry didn't really help.

          Look at this screenshot, which shows comments from an Apple Pencil done on a PDF in Acrobat on iPadOS. It's hideous!!

          Joel Geraci
          Community Expert
          Joel GeraciCommunity Expert
          Community Expert
          September 15, 2020

          Very interesting. Without knowing what your handwriting actually looks like, I find the markup in Acrobat easier to read. I think the difference is caused by the pen location sample rate though.

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