How do i neatly highlight text in Acrobat?

[michaeldifeo]

Hi, I'm wondering if something has changed in the program.  In the past i was able to click and drag over pdf text (after it was converted) to neatly highlight blocks of text.  Now, the highlight tool is operating freehand and it's making my documents messy.  Is there a setting or way to change it back? 

Thanks for any assistance!

[Document Geek]

It's not perfect, but maybe try using the drawing tools with some transparency. It's not perfect, but it will let you highlight in a straight line. Here is an example of how I use that tool on a spreadsheet chart (of sorts), but it offers a great explanation of how to adjust the settings for various purposes: Document Geek: Adobe Reader XI for Knitters

[beisenbe]

What nonsense!

Everyone wants to highlight text the way Acrobat always has for 11 or so releases

and the way all other software does.

What IDIOT made this disastrous change?

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

And you still can! Nothing has changed in the way the text highlight tool works for regular text, it's just that for documents that do not contain text, and which you could not highlight in previous versions of Acrobat, you can now do that.

[Juliette5C81]

I don't think that is the case though. I am trying to highlight the text in a pdf created from a PowerPoint presentation. The slides are literally just text that my professor typed out. I was actually able to highlight them just fine the other day, so I don't know why I now have messy dark yellow puffy cloud situation as everyone is calling it. I think my Adobe updated sometime in the past 48 hours, so I guess that is the culprit. I swear, this is why I hate updating software; someone is always trying to find a solution to a problem that does not exist.

[Juliette5C81]

Here's a screenshot of the page.

[Document Geek]

I feel that many of the complaints regarding the highlighter tool could be resolved if Adobe was too add a “Highlight” blend mode to the drawings tools. That way, we could simply draw rectangles or

polygons around the tea that we want to highlight and check the “Highlight” button, and the shape would then act as a highlighter. If you’d like this feature, please vote for it here on he Acrobat User Voice page: Use the Drawing Tools to highlight objects – Share your feedback on Acrobat DC

[try67]

They did. You can highlight in "free form" mode if you hold down Ctrl while using the tool.

[Document Geek]

But if one has an all-vector PDF that does not contain fonts (like an architectural CAD drawing), there is still no way to highlight text. I just get a dialog box asking me if I want to run text recognition. Sometimes the ODR rasterizes the PDF and ruins it. It would be great if there was a way to highlight all vector PDFs with lapses, rather than with the regular highlighter tool.

[IT ALRB]

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

Issue: If the highlighter is going over multiple text and you want it just to highlight the one line this is what I did to resolve the issue.

Note:

Just as a heads up the PDF that i was testing this on already had Text recognition enabled so i advise run the Enhance scan first before performing steps 1, 2, or 3

Steps

     To do this go to Tools > Enhance Scan > Recognize Text > In this file > Recognize Text

Answer's

1. On some documents Text Recognition fixed the issue but this was not true for all of the documents i tested on.
2. Save the file as a word document. Then open the word document. Save the file again as a PDF. Now you should be able to highlight just one line of text.
3. Alternative answer once the document is in word you can highlight the text before converting it back over to PDF.

[alisonp8655609]

I am having the same issue of having lost the ability to select and highlight text in straight lines in Acrobat Reader (on a Mac). I now have only the circle cursor that will only do free-form highlighting.  This switch happened literally in the middle of editing a document. I can't figure out how to get back the straight-line cursor that provides neat highlighting--the highlighter tool doesn't give options as it did before. I tried restarting Acrobat but it didn't make a difference.

[richardla-lfp]

Well, the selection tool is *not* intuitive or working "right out of the box" - I am using the latest version of DC and my highlighting tool seems to be selecting a random block of text - and, by appearances, defaulting to a huge cursor (font size) setting. Once selected, I can't adjust the selection window to frame only the desired text. Wish it worked like it used to...simple, intuitive. Searched all Preferences and Settings - thought maybe it had to do with page or view scale. Can anyone help that does *not* work for Adobe? Thank you. attaching screen shots...

[try67]

As mentioned above, that is usually the result of an incorrect OCR process.

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

It's also possible that the PDF file was generated with a low quality PDF generator, and that no OCR was involved at all. Unfortunately, there is no way to get this document to behave any better. You can however create a new document based on the current one by saving as a high resolution TIFF image (or a series of images), and then importing these TIFF images back into Acrobat. When you now run OCR, you should end up with a document that can be correctly highlighted. This is not straight forward, and will of course not bring over anything that is in the original document besides the actual pixels that would print (e.g. meta data, form fields, JavaScript, ...), but if the only objective is to have a document that can be highlighted, then it's certainly an option.

[dreww30321656]

That isn't true.  That is what it looks like on about half of all docs, and there's no apparent rhyme or reason to it.  Try printing an article from the web.  You can run OCR (and that, too, has become more difficult - when I hit the Aa tool, I don't need another pop-up to say "recognize" - that's why I hit Aa - to recognize text.

[dreww30321656]

Can someone from Adobe answer this question already?  I've used Adobe Pro for years, and what most of us need to do is highlight texts, not draw yellow clouds in shapes we can't control.  How do I just highlight text sequentially by moving from left to right along a line, like every other program in the universe can do?  Did someone create the new program while on acid?  The Default should be to highlight text, not huge swaths of space.  PLEASE ANSWER IN ENGLISH, AND LIST THE STEPS, PLEASE!

[Guest]

This is not an improvement!  No one can freehand neatly.  The documents look like a mess.  In addition the color has changed to orange.  Adobe is slipping badly.  I've resisted Nuance, but after this latest "improvement", I guess I'm forced to change.

[Diego232714501o5o]

Thank you for the mention of Nuance.  I'll have to check it out.
It's very frustrating to have "improvements" imposed and then have resistance to negative

feedback.  

[ryanh16817506]

This is a terrible flaw, Adobe really needs a competitor so that we can hold them accountable with our dollars. Literally all it would need to be is a shift click. Now I'm going to try and do my work in Indesign instead, this is slowing me down and costing me time. Fix your stuff Adobe!

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Make sure you're using the correct Acrobat tool to select text and apply the highlighter to it.

• Use the black pointer/selection tool in the basic toolbar. It's next to "Michael Jackson's glove."
• The text needs to be live, editable (and selectable) text, not graphical text.
• If it's graphical text, you'll need to OCR it with Acrobat's Enhance Scans tool.

Use the main selection tool to select text.

[Diego232714501o5o]

Thank you for the mention of Indesign.  I'll have to check it out.
It's very frustrating to have "improvements" imposed and then have resistance to negative feedback.  

[skillful_partner5E41]

Hey, Adobe.

The first complaint abt the highlighting tool was dated 2016. It's now 2020 and the problem still hasn't been resolved.

What gives? Aren't you supposed to be paying attention to users' feedback?

WE DON'T WANT THE BLOODY BALL. WE WANT TO HIGHLIGHT TEXT, A PARAGRAPH AT A TIME AND NOT WITH A BLEEDING PENCIL THAT CAN'T DRAW STRAIGHT LINES.

When do you intend to sort this out?

Thank you.

[ls_rbls]

Hi,

You'll get a better chance of voicing your request using the wishform rather than the user to user  community support forums https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html&ved=2ahUKEwiu5M681aDnAhXXLc0KHVOvDAAQFjAAegQIARAB&usg=A... 

[Wendi M.]

Nice.  "you'll get a better chance of voicing your request using the wishform rather than the user to user community support forums" and the link is broken...takes me to another page, and gives me an error 404.  

Instead of replying back to us with the "script" answers that you're given, it would be nice if you could actually help us, since I believe that is your job.  

I have tried every single suggestion here, and am still unable to make a straight line with highlight.  I know how to change the color and width (by the way, it's really stupid that you can't make those changes until AFTER you've applied the highlight), and to no avail.  I have used the arrow next to the hand, to draw a box, and clicked on the highligher, then the box goes away, and there is no highlight.  Really getting frustrated, and it looks like this issue has been going on since 2016!!  People pay good money for Adobe Pro, so it seems you all would care a little more, and would be our "voices" to management or development or whichever team is over the highlight "feature".  Guess Adobe is just too big to care about how their customers feel about the tools.  Adobe used to be so intuitive, powerful and easy to use...it's really a shame what has become of the software.

And as far as I can tell, Adobe has completely made the highlighter unusable except for individual words, and therefore I will be looking for another PDF editor that actually listens to their customers, and has the tools available that we need...and that we thought we were getting with Adobe.  

Thanks for absolutely no help at all...except touting the "improvements" that have been made.  These are not improvements...try using them yourself, they don't work.  You may want to rethink what you are doing, Adobe.

[ls_rbls]

Here's a non-broken link:

https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html 

I am  Adobe customer just like you.  I come here to this snake pit every day to try and help users, just because I love technology and love to learn.

I don't get paid, and just like many others this is all on a voluntary basis; my real-life job has nothing to do with computers.

Anyway, you will notice that Adobe employees will have an Adobe logo next to their names here in the forums.

Sometimes they come here and help. But like I said before, if you use the the bug report / feature request wishform you'll get a better chance of opening a support ticket and have the engineering team take a look at it.

At least that is what I've read  before here in the forums, not following any tech-support-by phone@at home agent  script.

[TXCraig]

Obviously this "improvement" was made by someone who has never had to use their own product in a business envrionment.