Adobe Freehand Mx 11.0.2 129
Cre Wallace
I need to backcheck some pdf drawings and to do so, i highlight my original markup if its been picked up. While doing this, ive noticed there are two forms of the highlight tool. Both come from the same tool button the "highlight tool". One form is a circular cursor that does freehand highlighting. The other is a vertical bar like a capitol letter "I" that only highlights text. I cant determine why, but the version of the tool that i get to use varies between pdf's. Is there a way to set the freehand tool as default?
You probably have worked this out by now, it took me a while to figure it out as well. If it is a scanned pdf then you need to do/run a text recognition/image recognition on the page (or you can also choose the entire document). Once you do that it recognizes the individual sentences and then the text cursor appears. I use the Comment tool, select with the text cursor then click on the highlighter symbol to highlight the selected text.
I am being as kind as I possibly can -- whoever designed this software may be a fantastic coder and computer nerd, but has no common sense or idea what most users would need.
Most people I know OFTEN use the redact and the highlighter. This highlighter tool is such a disgrace that it has been easier for me to just print out the document, highlight it manually and then rescan...no kidding.
They see that many people are having a great deal of problem with this tool -- where it should be extremely simple, you want the free-hand or the select for a nice pro look -- it appears they have made it deliberately complicated instead.
This is not at all the correct answer. He/She orginally asked how to make it freehand, INSTEAD of only on text. No one cares about making it highlight only text. This post reply has helped no one. Answer this: How do I make the highlighter freehand?
This is still an issue in 2024. I work mainly with civil and architectural drawings, the ability to switch between highlight modes would be handy. Highlight text does not help when you need to highlight a pipe running diagonally across the page. The ability to switch between types of highlighting would be useful.
Adobe Acrobat DC is horrible at editing every aspect of .pdf when comparing to MS Word. If you have office 365, the easiest way I've found is to export the .pdf to MS word do your edits and highlights and edits, then to export the .pdf from MS word, not adobe. There are additional features that are carried over from when using the MS exprot to .pdf feature adobe acrobat feature. Editing .pdf files in MS Word is much easier than adobe. The only thing adobe acrobat is good for is adding, removing, organizing pages, and exporting .pdf files to MS word. Also, another good feature of MS word is sharing documents with others is much easier. You don't have to use the Adobe Acrobat server.
I agree this is frustrating, I found a way around this by exporting my original document to pdf rather than printing to pdf (what i originally did) I then Saved exported downloaded file to computer, then opened the saved document. For whatever reason the highlighting worked perfectly then. This may or may not help everyone but thought it might work for some.
What's crazy to me is that over a year ago I had both options, I would select the highlighter tool and right next to the color it showed an option for freehand/text and I could easily swap between both options with a click.. They got rid of that feature.. I reached out to support thinking it was an error but it was not.
The only workaround I have found is to make the marker tool a different color, around 40% transparent, and increase the size. It's very annoying if you also want to make freehand notes in red pen because you are then switching back and forth.
Got an email notification that someone up voted a comment I had. Completely forgot that I had made this post. Unfortunately the issue never got resolved for me and our company has been slowly transitioning to bluebeam. I've very much loved the program and has fixed a lot of the issues I've had.
Hey I have Adobe Acrobat Pro verion 2024, and this highlighter issue has been a problem since 2015. Why hasn't Adobe after all this time not provided a popup option to toggle to freeform highlighter? Once I get a PDF with a couple of text recoginzed objects it defaults to text highlighter but I don't want to highlight text and it become useless. I need to be able to toggle to freeform and go about my document parkup. The text highlighter doesn't even work properly, I have to fight it to highlight the word or sentence properly. The text recongnition tool identifies letters and tries to collect them into words and sentances, but it tends to not string them together a lot of the time. I get why this happens, but when it happens I need to be able to rapidly toggle to freeform highlighter. I do not want to be modifing the pen function to do this because I use that for markups and that takes way to many extra frustrating steps to reconfigure back and forth. The highligher just needs a toggle, like when you want to add text to a PDF you get options to change size and style.
Holding down the Ctrl button unfortunately doesn't change it over to the "free form" mode. I had better capabilities regarding the highlighter using Adobe Acrobat Reader than I now do after paying for a subscription of Adobe Acrobat Pro. How sad is that?!? I'm working on engineering drawings and need to highlight elements on the drawing that are not text, so I can count how many specific items we need to order for our client. Only being able to highlight the text in the Pro version makes a person question splashing out the money on the paid version of the software. If someone knows a 2023 version of how to show the "free form" highlighter tool, that is still very useful in the current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, please advise.
Also, I am sure someone will provide this workaround. I am aware that i can change the drawing freehand tool to mimic a highlighter. I would just prefer to have the freehand highlighter instead of a workaround.
I have Adobe pro dc. I received a pdf file of 200+ pages. I want to highlight some entries. All I can find is the freehand O shaped icon that makes it look like a 5 year old or a drunk highlighted it. So how to I mark text and then color it?
Nope that don't work either. No it seems to be only on this document I downloaded. It is OCR, I have edited and saved as a different file. I optimized it stil only the O and the selection tool the cross
Sorry for the delayed response and inconvenience caused. Would you mind sharing a screenshot of the Oval shape highlighter? To share the screenshot, refer to -7043#jive_content_id_How_do_I_attach_a_screenshot
Anand Sri - I'm having the same text highlighting problem you addressed here. I want to keep the highlighter tool as a text highlighter NOT freeform. I didn't see you give a specific answer, though. Help?
Instead of using Highlight tool, use the Pen tool, adjust color and opacity and it would work as a highlight and it is definitely free form and has nothing to do with if the PDF has recoginized text, images or etc.
Same issue. This cannot possibly be an upgrade. It's a definite downgrade. In recent documents, I was able to nicely highlight in a straight, block pattern and now it has changed to a circle highlighter that is anything but uniform... it's a disaster. Also, underlining, which worked along with the old highlighter, no longer functions.
I use Acrobat DC to freehand annotate student essays on a Surface Pro running Windows 10. I prefer to use Acrobat because it is easy to open and save the PDF documents that I download; however, Acrobat changes the handwritten annotations slightly. This results in it "smoothing out" my 'w' to be a 'u,' spiking certain lines well above where they should end, and making the dots above my 'i' huge. As someone who teaches English, and who's students are already overwhelmed by both the content and their own preconceived notions, having choppy annotations adds to the issue rather than help solve it. I cannot find where there are settings to adjust this in Acrobat, and I know that the issue is not with the Surface or the pen because I can annotate in Drawboard (which I am not allowed to install on a work computer) and OneNote (I would use this, but it adds about ten minutes per essay to import and export, which amounts to about 900 extra minutes for each round of drafts) without this issue occurring. Any suggestions for fixing this problem in Acrobat are welcome.
Lastly, almost none of us work for Adobe here and none of us are paid. We do not need to be swore at. We do not need any abuse. We work no better nor worse under pressure from rude people but often sleep better when working with people who treat us like human beings. Just becuase you are ignorant of how an appliation works and to lazy to look up instructions on line or in a book does not give you right to treat us rudely.
Not all people want it this way. The 10pt limit of the drawing tool is too limiting, where the actual highlighter has a much wider line that requires considerably less time to highlight drawings on a 24x36 architectural sheet. Adobe needs to add a key press that lets us choose between highlighting text (which I never need) and just freehand highlighting. Even if it meant I had to hold CTRL down everytime, that's fine.
I'm having some issues regarding the highlight tool recently. Earlier today, I was using Adobe Acrobat Reader normally. When I opened it again, I noticed the highlight tool was no longer leaving a trail before releasing the mouse button while highlighting freehand (See first image).
I tried checking for updates and repairing installation, but to no avail. I also tried this in other PDFs. Text highlighting worked normally, but all freehand highlighting had the same issue. What can I do?
I am asking if anyone still working with this vector freehand program. I tried to install on my Mac OS 10.7 but could not. What I was told when trying to install it was that the Adobe Illustrator is now the continuation of Macromedia Freehand MX. I never used adobe illustrator before and I can not find it easy to apply my Freehand skills onto it. Fpr example in Freehand I can make a text encircle evenly but in Adobe Illustrator I hardly find tools to do the same. Please advise.
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