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

[nur development]

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?

[Joel Geraci]

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.

[arvindy]

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

[nur development]

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!!

[George_Johnson]

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

[nur development]

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!

[моника3358059039yo]

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