Acrobat DC Highlighting- How to highlight in a straight line...?

[Zeedonk]

Hi all-

Our office recently installed Acrobat DC and we are becoming more familiar with it as we go...

For me, I receive large scanned document files that I have to read, highlight, redact, sometimes edit and comment.

I am able to use the highlight tool fairly easily, but is there a way to highlight in a straight line, rather than to have the shake of a hand make my document look unprofessional?  The highlighter gives me a circle for a cursor and it does not hug the text line at all.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Frank

[WoodLawLLC]

[I am using Acrobat Pro DC]

Hold down the CTRL key while highlighting the text your want marked. If your line is reasonably straight, when you release the mouse and CTRL key, the application will then straighten it out.

Then you can actually select the highlighting as if it was an image, which it actually is, and move it around.  I have not figured out how to change its shape.

[JIPJIPNET]

Beware of this feature: in some readers the highlighting is opaque, as I learned when I read pdf's on iAnnotate for iPad.

[lizl27120467]

What about on Mac?

[Dizturbed]

This tool auto-straightens short or quick strokes. Do NOT attempt to "draw" the highlight line over the entire section of text you are wanting highlighted. Once you have created the short "straight" line, exit out of the highlight tool. Now click the highlight you created and you can stretch it horizontally, vertically, or both and this will keep the line horizontal with the sqiggly effect.

[internetexperts]

TRY67's answer is partially right.  You must OCR the document so Adobe recognizes the words as "TEXT".  If you don't OCR then the Highligher tool says... oh this isn't text... it's actually a picture.  So it does the best i can and lets you draw the same color highlighting you have selected over whatever you move the mouse over.  It takes a steady hand and it's treated differently by PDF reading programs.  So if you really want to properly highlight a document then you need to OCR the document, save it and only then use the highlighter to.

[Elaina31920519joqw]

HOW TO FIX THIS ISSUE:

If you need to highlight text on a PDF but you see a small circle instead of a text cursor icon (looks like " I "), this is how to fix it.  Export the PDF as a Word document (trust me, this will work) and save the file.  Then, open the Word document and export/publish/save as a PDF.  Open this new, updated PDF file.  Now when you need to highlight the text, you will see the text cursor icon (" I ").

[JIPJIPNET]

OCR-ing the file is simpler and safer. 

I now systematically OCR (and sometimes re-OCR*) all texts before I use them. I found it simpler to buy another PDF app with OCR capabilities that I can run simultaneously while working on other texts—it is that important to me (as is my time : ) )

*older OCR'd texts are not always well done (eg JSTOR documents)