How to disable automatic smoothing of the pencil tool

[pauls96137564]

I'm using adobe acrobat standard DC.

I've been looking all over for this to no avail. When I'm marking up documents, sometimes the automatic smoothing of the pencil tool messes up my writing/drawings. Any Ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[harshas13 · Accepted solution]

Hi Pauls,

Sorry for the delayed response.

In Acrobat DC, we do not have an option to disable automatic pencil smoothing.

Just as a suggestion , you can try our other markup and drawing tools to draw various lines and shapes if that fits your purpose.

Let me know if that works for you.

Could you also please share a screenshot of the file indicating the impact of the automatic smoothing of pencil tool so we could check it?

-Harsha

[laughingrice]

Ran into this when I was looking for the same solution.

The smoothing algorithm is way to aggressive.

In may have worked if all I wanted to draw was lines (and then the suggestions of using the other markup and drawing tools might have been relevant), but in the modern days of accurate digital pens, the extreme smoothing makes it really difficult to write intelligible text (unless I write really slow and with large letters, e becomes c, r becomes a v, s becomes a nearly vertical line script text becomes an unintelligible squiggle)

Unfortunately, without being able to turn off the algorithm it is difficult to show a screen capture, although from a close look, it looks that the number of points being used for the spline are time based and not curvature based (with some additional excessive culling after the fact)

It would be extremely useful to be able to tweak these parameters

[Viking_Professor]

Completely agree with everyone here.  I have multiple devices with pen and tablet capabilities and for years I've been unable to simply write letters and words on a PDF document because of this feature.  It is unbelievable how long Adobe Acrobat has been around and they can't simply create a feature where you can write legibly on a document. 

Any alternatives to using Adobe Acrobat?  Our institution pays for Adobe products, and some of them are good, but Acrobat continuously lets me down despite how long it has been around. 

Adobe: Please at least take the first action of turning off this aggressive smoothing or allowing the user to control how aggressive it is. The user is after all the one trying to use your software to be productive.  Do not mandate how you feel we should be using it.  

[mhawley2]

I agree too , please adobe ,gIve us an INI file or some sort of back water setting for advanced users . Customization always leads to efficienty .

[KurtP19]

Why is this question marked as solved? The answer that it is not possible to set the smoothing is not a solution. Try zooing into a document and handwrite some text betwen two lines, if it is legible, you have the nicer handwriting than I do.
Btw. I use DrawboardPDF for annotating my pdf's, it's much much better.

[Simonmmm]

*bump*

This is not a solution or "solved".

So annoying since all everyone wants is to be able to turn a "feature" off. That's not hard to program.

[wroyer@ntwo.com]

This is ridiculous. It is very difficult to use the pencil feature to make notes or hand-fill a PDF file because of the automatic pencil smoothing/shaping. Listen to your customers. Provide a simple checkbox to turn this "feature" off so that those of us who would like to use the pencil in this manner can do so without having to erase and undo every five seconds. Does anyone even use the Pencil as it was intended by Adobe??

[arvindy]

Hi wroyer@ntwo.com ,

Adobe Acrobat and Reader official update (20.009.20063) containing the fix for this issue is now available. This update will be automatically pushed to all existing installations of Acrobat and Reader. You may also manually trigger the update early by opening the application and going to Help > Check for Updates.
More information about this release is here: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/release-note/release-notes-acrobat-reader.html 
Please take a note that you need to create a registry to enable this fix. Please follow the steps-

- 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.

Thanks for your patience and support!

Regards,
Arvind

[wroyer@ntwo.com]

Thank you Arvind!

I've updated and applied the registry change and confirmed that this has disabled auto pen tool smoothing in the latest version of Acrobat DC. I appreciate the help!

[amandafoley]

Hello, are you willing to share some detailed steps for creating a registry? Thank you.

[mmpentool]

Hi Arvind,

that sounds lovely. How to do under MacOSX?

[Rachel9165]

Arvind- can we get some more detailed instructions on how to do this please? I have attempted to "create a registry" but pen smoothing appears to be still on and I don't know what to do specifically.