PDF note-taking enhanced with support for text comments

Microsoft

 

 

Greetings Insiders,  

The ability to add text comments on PDF documents is one of the features we provided for the PDF reader in legacy Microsoft Edge. We have heard feedback that some of you miss this useful feature, so we are pleased to announce that we are bringing it back to Microsoft Edge! Here is how you can access this functionality in the latest version of Canary and Dev.  

To try it out, open any PDF file in Microsoft Edge. Select the piece of text you want to comment on and invoke the right click context menu. You will see the new Add comment option in the menu 

 

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Clicking that option will open a text box where you can add your comment. Then simply type the comment you want to leave on the document, then click the checkmark to save the comment

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Once note is added, the selected text will be highlighted, and a comment icon will appear to indicate the comment. You can hover over that icon to preview the comment or click on it to open and edit it.  

 

vygadeka_2-1605594397337.png 

Alternatively, you can also add comment on text highlight you had previously added in the documentJust right click on any existing text highlight to add a comment on it. You can add as many comments as you want on a PDF document. You can also delete the comments previously added using the Delete button present inside the note.  

Once you are done adding your comments on the document, you can save the document so that your comments are saved as part of the document. You can access the comments anytime later by opening the saved document in Microsoft Edge.  

Try out the text comment tool in latest Canary or Dev channel and let us know what you think! We would love to hear your feedback to make improvements in futureFrom within Microsoft Edge, you can go to “…” menu > Help and feedback > Send feedback, or simply use the shortcut (Shift+Alt+Ion a PC to open the feedback tool. 

 

  - The Microsoft Edge Product Team 

31 Replies

@vygadeka 

Thanks for the update,

I really like to see the commenting and highlight feature to be the same as Edge legacy, because it was easier and more convenient

 

you just needed to highlight a text and then choose comment/highlight/copy/search

 

 

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@vygadeka Thanks for the update. It's great to see these improvements on PDFs.

This is one of the most requested features users asks for at Forums. Looking forward to give it a try! 

@HotCakeX we are currently working on a similar quick access menu for making these tools handy to use. It would show up in the builds soon. Till then we wanted to enable everyone to use the comment tool from context menu. Thanks for the prompt feedback, as always :smile:

"we are currently working on a similar quick access menu for making these tools handy to use"
@vygadeka Awesome, looking forward to it,

@vygadeka 


@vygadeka wrote:

@HotCakeXwe are currently working on a similar quick access menu for making these tools handy to use. It would show up in the builds soon. Till then we wanted to enable everyone to use the comment tool from context menu. Thanks for the prompt feedback, as always :smile:


Thanks, it's good to know that it's on the way :) 

Thank you @vygadeka 

It is very helpful feature and hope to see it in official release of Microsoft Edge soon.

It would have been nice if there was possibility of add different color for comments too. In addition, having ability to navigate to next or previous comment (like feature in Microsoft Word) would have been interesting.

In case of ability to set different color, usability study is needed so it won't conflict with Highlight colors.

 

@Reza_Ameri-Archived 

Spoiler

@Reza_Ameri-Archived wrote:

Thank you @vygadeka 

It is very helpful feature and hope to see it in official release of Microsoft Edge soon.

It would have been nice if there was possibility of add different color for comments too. In addition, having ability to navigate to next or previous comment (like feature in Microsoft Word) would have been interesting.

In case of ability to set different color, usability study is needed so it won't conflict with Highlight colors.

 


You can already add different colors for comments, it's done using highlights.

no conflicts.

 

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I think in the table of contents of PDFs, there should be indications so we can see which pages contain notes/comments.

@HotCakeX 


I think in the table of contents of PDFs, there should be indications so we can see which pages contain notes/comments.

That's a great suggestion! I don't know what the feasibility of that would be (not all PDFs support having a ToC,) but I could definitely see the value in that functionality.

 

Fawkes (they/them)
Program Manager & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

@vygadeka Thanks for adding this. I would also like to have a Comments pane where I can see a list of all the comments in the document, similar to Adobe Reader.

@HotCakeX 


Spoiler
I think in the table of contents of PDFs, there should be indications so we can see which pages contain notes/comments.

+1 for that.

I really hope that this feature will be released to the stable version very very soon. It would help me soooo much for my online class. I'd always open my lecture video, while annotate my pdf with highlights and comments for additional information given by my lecturer. I'm now using Adobe Reader just for the highlight with comments feature but the overall performance of Adobe Reader is just not as fluid and seamless as utilizing pdf on Edge. I can't wait to use it on Edge. Thanks!

@Deleted 

The indicator for notes could be in scroll bar , like it highlight areas where there is comment in scroll bar and user quickly move to them and also ability to click next/prev comments (like Microsoft Word comment)

@Reza_Ameri-Archived Are you looking for a similar UI to when you use the "Ctrl+F" functionality within Microsoft Edge?

 

Fawkes (they/them)
Program Manager & Community Manager - Microsoft Edge

"highlight areas (when there is a comment) in scroll bar" That UI looks better than in TOC.
@Deleted

I think I like this better than (or in addition to) TOC (and in addition to a comments pane.. but adding UI elements probably not preferred). Seeing at a glance from anywhere in the document where there are comments (and who made them/what they're for, if you can make the highlight color coded to the color of the highlight) is definitely more useful to me than simply knowing that there are comments somewhere within a general section of the entire PDF.

Of course, it could clash with Ctrl+F functionality if it's just the exact same UI, so some differentiation would be needed.

@Deleted 

Yes, you are right.

However, we should consider it should work in a way to avoid conflict , let say we have documents with notes and we also want to find text like you mentioned. Probably, there should be different colors or different look and feel , so people would know which one is note and which one is search.

 

Like this feature, too.
I'm so sorry but I don't have a clue as to what you are talking about. I'm very new at this ,I'm 64 years old I had no clue of a computer, but I, wanted to startrt my online business so I bought books and stared to teach myself and I did. I know this has nothing to do with your discussion , please forgive me maybe you can start one about helping people with, what they need to kinow . I have even built my first website in Wordpress, it me a year but I did it. I'm so sorry I messed up your discussion but thak you for letting me say a few words anyway. I promise you that you would not want me to to sat anthing about your discussion because I don't know what the hell I would even be talking about. From what I read of your replies I will be lokking in on how to teach myself another new thing ,only this time I hope it don.t take a year I may not have that many left. LOL love you guys
Thanks again Brenda

@hulseybfk219gmailcom 

That was an interesting comment :)

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