How to Highlight in Straight Lines

[patrickd69773459]

Hello,

My version of Adobe Acrobat Reader was recently updated, and now the highlighting tool acts more as a "pen" or doodle" tool that only locks onto lines of text and conforms to them as a straight line if the line I draw is very close to a straight line. Does anyone know if there is a way to highlight text so that it snaps to the lines of text neatly every time? I am finding it difficult to highlight the text I need to with the new free-form line drawing version of the highlighting tool. Thank you for anyone who may have an solution.

Patrick

[try67]

Are you able to select the text using any other tools? If not, then it's not real text, but an image that contains text. As such, the highlighter tool reverts to "free form" mode when you use it on top of that image. If you place it above "real" text it will switch back to text selection mode.

[Guest]

This answer is correct. However, I refuse to believe that Adobe meant for the option to highlight non-text documents to leave an unprofessional looking mess.

[L. Jane]

I was able to solve this problem--that is, make it possible to select text to highlight--by going to the Convert menu and choosing Scan & OCR. That seems to change the scanned image of text into searchable text, which makes the highlighter tool work normally instead of like a messy pen or brush. 

[AnandSri]

Hi @L. Jane,

I hope you are doing well, and glad to know that the issue got fixed. You can also highlight in straight lines using Adobe Acrobat, or Acrobat Reader, by following these steps:

1. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
2. Select the Comment Tool: Click on the “Comment” tool in the right-hand pane.
3. Choose the Highlight Tool: In the toolbar, select the highlight tool.
4. Hold the Shift Key: While highlighting, hold down the Shift key to ensure the highlight is applied in a straight line.

For detailed information, you can also see this article: Use annotation and drawing markup tools to add comments in PDFs, Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader

Feel free to reach out, if you experience any issues.

Thanks,

Anand Sri.