Forum Discussion
Inking on Web Pages - Discussion
The only thing i would add at the moment is the ability to send the marked up web page to people through the phone app natively, so that everything can be integrated. I also saw a comment that brought up that it would be nice to have the links in the snip be usable, and this would be very helpful if you circle a link for someone to clink on but i believe it would be hard to implement.
Elliot Kirk, many here have said "everything we have in old Edge must be the starting point." I realize that's useless to you. It's a bad combination of the classic problem "If everything is important, then nothing is important" and a failure to recognize that Microsoft needs to pare back unused features over time to keep everything lean and the fact the old Edge peaked at about 4.5% market share -- it failed, hence the need to change direction. However, the feedback does reflect expectations: when you take away something that someone had that worked, even if no one else ever used it, that user will be upset. Further and unfortunately, those former Edge users (I'm one of them) tend to be the most vocal supporters of MS, so there's value from a word-of-mouth marketing perspective in giving added weight to your influencers. Sifting through all of that to get to a properly weighted statistical analysis on which features to add is the challenge.
For my part, I too would love the Inking capabilities we had in the old Edge. That would be ideal. However, I would be content in the short term with at least the currently implemented features for PDF -- pen and eraser. To prioritize for me personally, from most important to least important:
- Pen (blue or black) and some standard stroke width
- Eraser to remove mistakes
- Highlighters in at least 2 colors (in order of importance to me: yellow, green, pink, blue)
- Multiple colors for inking, so I can use Red and Blue/Black to indicate different things on pages I mark
- Ability to select among a few standard pen widths
- Ability to select a portion of a page for mark-up and be able to export just that section as a shareable file openable in any web browser or at least any other Edge browser, rather than sharing the entire page (this would require an improved export to HTML or maybe renewed support for MHTML)
- Pressure sensitive pen width
- Customizable pen button support to change pen color, width, or toggle between pen and highlighter using the button(s) directly on the pen
- Highlighter transparency/opacity selection
- Full color selectability for pen and highlighter
I feel like i'm starting to miss the point of this feature. As someone who has used MS Edge (UWP) since it was called Project Spartan and then has now switched to Chromium Edge, I do not believe that I have ever used this feature. (except the like one or two times which I played around with the feature when it was first introduced.)
Now - I think that the feature should definitely be added from the previous version of Edge - It was one of it's iconic features - but those of us who have been edge fans for years must also remember that unlike Edge UWP, the new version of edge is being supported across multiple platforms which each provide their own ways of doing this same thing. For example - on my iPad Pro, if I want to mark up a web page, I screenshot it, tap 'full page', and then use my pencil to sketch on it. On mac, it's a similar process. But then we have my desktop, where Microsoft seems to have 4 different ways of doing almost the same thing:
- If I don't need to draw, just add notes or save something, I could add it to collections, or to sticky notes. Collections will sync across my PC and Mac, since they both use edge. However, I would not be able to view them on my android phone or iPad. If I add it to sticky notes, I could view it on my PC, iPad, and Phone - but not my mac.
- Now, the entire story changes if I want to draw - I could use the Add notes feature that is built into UWP edge, Screenshot it with Snip and Sketch, or Send it to OneNote. Which one am I supposed to use?!?
Someone else already mentioned how Sticky Notes and OneNote seem to overlap somewhat in functionality, and I agree - I cannot ever remember which one I saved that photo from the one webpage to or the other string of text that I needed for later. Now we also have collections, which share some of the same features from both apps - but not all, and neither of the other apps integrate with collections either. I know everyone wants to be able to mark up webpages in edge, the developers need to be cautious about not providing 'just another way' to do something that doesn't integrate well with other MS apps or Windows in general.
thatpitter, if you all you want to do is mark the page within the scope of what fits in the window, those other approaches work fine. On the other hand, if you want to mark comments spanning more of the page than fits in the browser window, Edge's Inking feature is the only real option. This supports the full length of web page, keeping the ink properly positioned on the page as you scroll. Keep in mind that most web pages, especially those that are likely to be the subject of an extensive markup, are significantly longer than the browser window.
- Definitely.
Its not just screenshot and edit. That also hat it's uses.
Being able to save a whole wen page enables a whole lot of productivity that's not viable with screenshots.
When researching for example ( ok by that i just mean searching various papers , articles etc.) on a topic, ome usually reviews dozens or hundreds of articles, papers, documents etc.
These are usually a few to many tens of pages.
It's not viable to review and capture notes via screenshots.
In that scenario, the old edge is brilliant.
I don't have any viable ways to do this.
There are some clunky workarounds.
For example print to onenote, then edit.
But they are not as efficient, nor as reliable (printing of web articles and forms is sometimes crap - mis -aligned and data missing, so that's not a viable approach.
