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
I use the draw feature of Microsoft Edge everyday to annotate pdf documents during classes as I'm a university student. This feature is very essential to my studies and I would therefore like to request microsoft to bring back all the missing features of the "draw" that were present in the old microsoft edge. Elliot Kirk
Edge Chromium's PDF Reader does support Inking, Highlighting. In all channels of Edge Chromium (Stable, Beta, Dev, Canary) open a PDF file and at the top you will see a toolbar containing Draw, Eraser, Rotate, Save, Print, Read Aloud, and on the left side a little page number where you can see current page and type in other page you want to go to. Highlighting is also supported, you just need to select text (highlight with mouse), right-click, and in menu you will see highlight in different colors as shown:
Here's a link to the PDF I used in the image, page 4 is a blank page for trying out the tools, and it's an interesting article about Air Pollution and how Ethanol blending in petrol/gasoline helps reduce it by someone working with the U.N.'s Energy Future Coalition (Sadaf Sobhani) (not mine but shared online by original authors so not copyright infringement): http://energyfuturecoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/final_clean-fuelsBOOK.pdf
I agree, this is one of the many things where the MS Edge team could look at existing extensions and integrate it.
For me, inking goes along with highlighting. Very often I am reading e-books or articles and need to retain excerpts for a company discussion I will have about them later, or to past them into a source sheet which I will hand out at a meeting. When the articles are very long, I have to keep track of where the excerpt was in the article while I'm reading it so that I don't have to go through the whole article again to find it when I'm done reading and want to jot down the quotes so that I can later add them to the source sheets. To do so right now, I am relying on an Extension to highlight webpages, but the highlights disappear when I refresh the page or delete the instance of the webpage and come back to the page sometime later, and it has no way of storing the highlights long-term in some pane or history system for quick reference later. A feature with highlighting and a convenient retrieval system like the one I have described would tremendously enhance my work experience and personal life.
Elliot Kirk - Here's how I use it. I'm in a big meeting mirroring my computer to a large 75 inch touch monitor. I pull up a good map or street view and want to be able to mark up that image with the click of the now defunct pen icon. It's easy, efficient, and was, without question, the best feature the browser had that set it apart from all the others.
Elliot Kirk I use inking on Web Pages when teaching. For example, I might put up a graph using Desmos.com and ask students to write the equation of that graph. I can then hand the surface to a student and with the inking, they can show the class how they got the equation, writing directly on the graph.
Another example, a student sends me a picture of their work through Edmodo. I can use the inking to mark up their work right on the website, screenshot it and send it right back to them. Its so much more convenient than having to download the pic, retrieve it, open it up in photos and then proceed.
One final example: finding info on the web, taking some notes and saving it to OneNote.
Inking on the web pages it why I use Edge instead of Chrome. I have a Surface because I use the pen all the time. Please put the inking on Web pages back.
- Online learning. When kids are able to mark on screen to take notes or do math problems, saves paper and makes teaching and learning a lot intuitive. With today's world, I don't think online education is going away!
Sir, the "Clip" feature in old Edge is really important for me. Please make it available on Edge Chromium. I am eagerly waiting for this feature as I am a student and I need to make a lot of documents for study. I like to have the ability to grab certain parts of web page quickly.
It will be even better if Edge team could support all tools shown in picture.
Elliot Kirk Another nice feature would be the ability to select text (or a link!), right click on it and have the choice to 'Send to new tab as PDF (editable)'. This would be an efficiency gain that, along with the editing features available in Edge (classic, so to speak) would leverage the pdf print engine and likely provide most of the features we need in inking.
If those new tab PDFs could give the option of producing the entire web page to pdf rather than a part of the page and skip the artificial formatting into letter size pages so much the better!
Here's hoping!
Hi,
I'm Kam. To know more about me, head over to my profile page! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/565232
If you guys place the ink like the classic Edge, where will you place it? Please send me a screenshot of Edge 88, 89, 91, or 92. 🙂 I'm waiting especially for the vertical tabs!
Thanks
Kam
Web annotations are just useful. I can't really say a scenario that I will use it but there are many occasions where I do use it when the time presents itself. Also Microsoft has made a computer with a touch screen (most of the time) and a pen (sometimes) called a Surface. Many people use Surfaces and the web inking feature is a very commonly used feature for them, it may even be absolutely necessary. The world is getting even more devices with pens and marking capabilities (like the Microsoft Surface, Samsung Galaxy Note smart phones, and many more devices). Tablet users with Edge installed will probably really appreciate this feature. With a world with increasingly more touch screen devices as time passes, it will be very important for a feature like marking up a web page.
I've used that feature mostly to make some quick and dirty notes on the go it was really useful on pages which do not provide a pdf document to work on (pretty much all websites).
Improvements
1) Enabling Site Event while taking notes
On old Edge the site was simply scanned and changed with the scrollable screenshot of the site where we were able to take our notes on.
What I'd like to see would be a way to take interactive notes that still toggle some events on the site idk while pressing a keyboard key that enables the real page and executes some hover events or longpress what ever. This is useful on content that is hidden behind those events where someone would like to take notes on.
2) More saving options
Ability to export the site as pdf or some kind of html file with notes applied. Allows us to mark text and the ability to take even more notes later
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But old edge already did his job really well.
