Highlighter tool for PDFs: Now with pen support

Microsoft

 

Greetings, Microsoft Edge Insiders!

 

We’ve heard that being able to highlight content in PDFs is important to you, so we rolled out highlighter support in Microsoft Edge version 85. Now, we’re pleased to announce that starting in version 86, we’re expanding the highlighting functionality to include support for a digital pen! We anticipate that this feature will particularly benefit those who read lots of PDFs, like students and researchers, allowing them to intuitively highlight important text, just like on physical paper.

 

To access this feature, open any PDF file from your computer or from the web. In the toolbar at the top, you will see the new Highlight option. You can click or tap on the button to enter the highlight mode. Once in this mode, you can drag your mouse or pen over any piece of text to highlight it. You can also change the highlighter color from the dropdown menu.

 

Screenshot.png

 

We have also added the support for the eraser to erase the highlights you added in case you make any mistakes. Just click on the Erase button to enter the eraser mode. Once in this mode, you can drag your mouse or pen across any highlight to erase it. Similarly, you can also use pen “back” button to erase highlights. The “Draw” tool is also available, which you can use to mark-up the documents you are reading. When you are done editing a document, you can save a copy of it along with all the edits.

 

We love hearing your feedback, so please try out this feature and let us know what you think. From within Microsoft Edge, you can go to “…” menu > Help and feedback > Send feedback, or simply use the shortcut (Shift+Alt+I) to open the feedback tool. We’re constantly adding more PDF features, so you can go here to check out our product roadmap.

Thanks for helping us create a great PDF experience!

 

- The Microsoft Edge Product Team

 

14 Replies

@vygadeka 

Thank you for sharing many users have been asking for these features and glad it is available now.

One general feedback would be adding more highlight colors.

Eraser is also very useful and many people don't know how to remove what they highlighted (right click and select None) and this way makes it easier for them. 

Looks good! Just a couple of notes,

The highlighting appears a bit blocky (see picture), is there any fix planned for this?

Also when erasing there should be a toggle for erasing all highlighting done in that action (current default) or only unhighlighting one word at a time.

xelast_0-1598660675267.png

 

Excellent update! This was an essential feature for researchers and students.

@vygadeka 

Before the update I relied very heavily on the note-taking abilities in PDFs as well. Is there any chance that might come back? When opening PDFs now that I took notes on in the past, the format is messed up and they are hard to read. 

@Reza_Ameri-Archived we haven't planned to add more colors but thanks for the feedback. This helps us consider it in the roadmap. 

@jasmi1240 if you mean the ability to add typed text notes, it is currently under the works. Also published as part of the roadmap here.

@ajasnz yes the fix for the blocky highlights is underway to make the experience a little better. Please stay tuned !! Eraser functionality for erasing the highlights letter by letter is in the roadmap for sure. Thanks for the feedback. 

@Jiboncom I am glad to hear that. I hope Microsoft Edge is your go to place for research :smile:.

@vygadeka 

Thank you, these colors are sufficient and they are color which are being used for physical highlighters in paper but having more color will make users more productive. It would be nice to have something like highlight finder , so user could press previous or next and it move to next or previous highlighted sentence.

@vygadeka  Okay but when are we bringing back the highlighter for the Edge browser...

@joeyneedsink Starting in Edge 88, it's available!

@ajasnz I am in agreement here. The original highlighting function in the Microsoft search browser was much better than current state.

 

This was the primary reason I favored MS over Google.

 

Since this has function has been disabled, I have mostly stopped using the MS product.

 

I am happy to see improvements on the way.

I would suggest That there must be a way to transfer all our highlights to some other location e.g. some other notetaking applications @vygadeka 

It really helps take a specific note while reading good feature