Forum Discussion
Inking on Web Pages - Discussion
We have received a lot of feedback about supporting inking annotations for web pages like what we have in the current version of Microsoft Edge. Many users have told us that they use this functionality as a daily driver and would like to see it in the new version of Microsoft Edge as well. We would like to understand the scenarios in which you would use this functionality. Details about what you use it for, what are the expectations about availability of different tools, saving and sharing options etc. would be extremely useful in making sure we provide the best user experience to you. Your input will help us making sure that the feature works best for you.
292 Replies
Elliot Kirk To be fair: even though I use inking a lot on my PC in other apps, I never really "got" what the inking feature in Edge was supposed to be used for, so it felt more like a gimmick than something useful. It doesn't happen on a daily basis that I want to share a webpage screenshot and ink on it as something useful - and if I want to do that, then Windows offers other more consistent experiences (screensnap and /or onenote). Moreover, the way it was linked to Onenote was a bit confusing to me.
What I do use on a daily basis is inking on pdf's. Please make that a super smooth experience!
I'd be quite curious to hear what the telemetry was telling about actual usage...Elliot Kirk - For developer and QA purposes, I would like to see the entire page (not just the visible portion or percentage of the page) get captured (screenshot?) and be able to mark it up in browser. Then have the ability to share/save/print the markups in Teams, OneNote, Outlook easily.
Elliot Kirk these are scenarios and reasons which I use the ink on webpage or add notes option;
1. I don't want to install another browser. I like my device to be clean and the default browser edge has been very accommodating, useful and fast for my needs.
2. somewhat the same on the reason above, since edge offers inking on web pages and pdf files, it has been my go to annotation program without having to download a separate program.
3. after annotating, the share button has been of much help since the annotated page or file usually ends up being shared to colleagues.
4. after annotating, i could go straight to printing it as well. very useful when its needed to be shared in a hard copy format.
5. not everyone has a microsoft office subscription or product (onenote), so being able to annotate inside the web browser has been a big plus since it works and it doesnt cost the user additional charge. in my case, since i am using a Samsung device with pen functionality, Samsung already has its own bundled software included but its still not to my liking since it takes a screenshot of the whole screen instead of just the web page and it can't annotate pdf files and save it as is like Edge
Elliot Kirk we need inking option. That's why I fell love with this browser. I am a student and taking notes is a time consuming and pricey issue. While i don't have web notes i have to download/print/ and then get my Colored pens/ highlighters/ sticky notes/ and pencils. If Microsoft can continue to offer this feature in the way it was with Legacy it will hold a special place among the students in many different fields. My favorite features were the ability to change the ink colors with pencils as well as changing the highlighter colors, also the option to change the size of the writing option was pretty cool. Another feature that I would Truly miss is being able to take notes on an entire web page versus clipping parts out. The ability to save the web page to locations in different files was faulty for my personally but it would be very useful to be able to specify saving locations.
Elliot Kirk I use inking to highlight something or use inking to encircle or to mark something whilst doing a project or seeking some information and save or share with someone else.
Elliot Kirk Late to the party, but wanted to add another use case that does seem common. We're running into this with our support team more and more, and we're desperately looking for a solution.
Problem - PDFs and annotations housed on network using the standard products. Vendor has said since 2016 'dont do that, don't edit pdfs on network shares'.
We're crashing more and more each day. We design a product web page, store it as a pdf in SharePoint, and through SP workflow notify the proofers that they need to take a look.
They annotate the pdf with text box/typed comments, maybe 5% of the time they're drawing/noting with their pens.
Edge is so close - we've got the drawing piece, and if a SharePoint library is synced to file explorer we can save back on top of the original .pdf, but we need that text box. Then we can drop the standard pdf application that is causing us so much grief, and just use the browser for proofing.
vygadekaMicrosoft
Robin Nilsson types comments (notes) on PDFs is something that we will be working on soon. It is great to know that you are using Sharepoint workflow for collaboration.
- Like others have stated, the starting point is having the same ability as edge legacy. Click the button, and immediately you are given a screen shot that you can customize. You should be able to write and highlight in various colors. Make notes on specific items and use the clip tool to capture only what you need. Then either save it to onenote or share it.
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.
- This should be possible with Your Phone app on Windows 10 and Android
I think a very important improvement to the web note functionality in the old Edge is that the webpage should not be reloaded after making a web note. You should also add an undo function when inking. If you do this I'm sure it will get used more.
I would also like the pen to draw ink without having to press a button first.
- Totally agree,
Edge classic does it by taking a screenshot of the whole page (including the parts that need to be scrolled down to be visible) and that's how they prevent the content of the web page from changing. - Also, need to be able to grab the eraser and erase what you want. Right now, the only option was erase ALL ink, not, just the last thing you did.
Cheers,
Drew
Sent from Windows Mobile- In the new Edge it's not like that, Eraser is just like any other tool and you can erase drawings one by one
Sent from Android Mobile
- As a surface user, I think that the main browser should support the pen input at 100%. Also I used to study on pdfs with edge because it allowed me to highlight, write and erase simply activating the draw mode.
Now that the pen support is the same as in Google Chrome (my desktop primary browser), I am losing interest in using Edge. And now I have to find a different solution for working on my pdfs. Bet I am not the only one disappointed by this, so it's in your interest to don't make a step backwards removing this feature from edge.
I hope to see this feature back very soon.- This functionality exists for PDFs on Edge Chromium, just open a PDF in Edge Chromium (any Channel, Stable, Beta, Dev, Canary) and in the the top right corner you will see the pen, higlighter and erase functions, alongside Rotate, Print, Read Aloud, Save, etc. Try it, it's like the old Web Inking but limited to PDFs only.
With due respect to all the people who keep coming back to the thread and tell that the inking functionality works in PDF.
We all know it and have been using it for so long.
The point of discussion is "inking on the web pages". So let us keep the focus on the same while we wait for the MS to deliver it.
since you mentioned PDFs, here is new feature recently added
Text highlighting is also available
these PDF inking features demonstrated are compatible with legacy Edge. meaning you can add them on either of the browsers and delete/modify it on the other.
it's getting there, gradually, the progress and development has just begun, every few days we get a new feature on Edge canary
- This is in reply to both people:
Inking IS available for PDFs in Dev & Canary.
It should be in Edge for PDFs, as well, soon.
I'm not saying it's definitely coming, but, we do expect Inking to, also, be in the browser itself, soon. Countless people want it and have been asking for it.
Cheers,
Drew
Sent from Windows Mobil- Why you write Sent from windows mobile on your posts? o.O
it's obviously not sent from windows mobile since you wrote "mobil" instead of "mobile"
it's an advertisement or something?
Hi all, coming here from the twitter reply to my question on the availability of inking in the new Edge.
For me the functionality needed is as such; To be able to draw freehand on a webpage (sketch, highlight .. ) and then send the result to outlook for emailing, OneNote for storage, Pictures folder as a picture.
My use case as a developer is mostly to simply draw changes to pages with customers and be able to keep true documented requests instead of printing to paper where things always go wrong...
Thanks for your interest in my needs!
- For online presentation we really need this feature let say I am sharing a website and I want to explain fill up form here, click this side or do this and what I have to do is to move my mouse over or use tools like Zoomit but having these options in Microsoft Edge would be great to be able to highlight change pen and so on. In other case, I might just take some notes and send it for someone , please including sharing in Microsoft Teams and Skype too.
