Forum Discussion
MicrosoftRoadmap for PDF reader in Microsoft Edge
Over the course of last year, we worked hard on building a powerful PDF reader that offers compatibility, reliability, and security for you and your organization.
The feedback we received from you from the Edge Insider builds has been really encouraging, and here are some of the most asked features that are available today, across Windows, Mac, and Linux:
Reading and Navigation:
- Table of Contents enables you to view the contents of PDF files and navigate to different parts seamlessly, improving your productivity.
- Page view enables you to view the PDF file in a book format, with the option to view the cover page separately.
- Caret mode lets you navigate through your PDF files and select text directly through your keyboard by enabling Caret mode by pressing F7.
- Accessibility support including keyboard accessibility, screen reader support, and capability to view PDFs in high contrast mode.
- Fill basic PDF forms directly in the browser. (Please note that XFA forms are currently not supported)
Annotation tools:
- Ink on PDF files with colors and stroke width of your choice.
- Text notes can be added quickly to text in the file to jot down thoughts for easy reference later.
- Create highlights with Highlight mode enables you to draw attention to parts of the PDF that you find interesting. With Highlight mode, you can now create highlights directly by selecting text, as you would do with a highlighter and paper.
- In-context annotations opens a quick menu right when you select text on PDF files, enabling you to take quick actions as highlight, copy without losing context.
Enterprise and Education:
- Read Aloud is now supported on PDF documents. You can use it either to retain focus while reading through it or to listen to PDF documents while multitasking!
- Dictionary and search through in-context menu keeps helps you understand the content and research better, while keeping you in context.
- Open Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) and Information Rights Management (IRM) protected PDFs and view permissions seamlessly within Microsoft Edge, without the need of any add-ins. MIP adds a layer of security to your documents. It ensures that only the users who have certain permissions such as view, copy, annotate can take those actions on the file. Hence, no matter where the document goes, the data of your organization remains secure.
- Viewing MIP files protected in other tenants: This will enable you to view the files protected in other organizations, or in other tenants in the organization.
- Certificate based Digital Signatures, which is currently under preview allows you to view and validate digital signatures present on PDF documents directly in the browser.
Here are the features we’re currently working on:
- View recovery: On re-opening a PDF file, reach your last-read location easily.
- File preview of PDF files in File Explorer and Outlook
- Add text box annotations: Add text boxes to fill forms, or take notes on PDFs
- Validate Certificate based Digital Signatures: We’re currently working on adding support for signatures with long-term validity.
Further down the line:
- Viewing labels of protected files
- Digital Signatures:
- Validating ETSI signatures
- Add Digital Signatures
- Accessibility improvements: Advanced capability to fill forms and navigate through a PDF document using screen readers.
We are actively looking at feedback from you about the features you find important.
Please feel free to comment below or submit detailed feedback through the browser by going to " ... menu > Help and feedback > Send feedback”.
I would like to see the following mark-up improvements:
- Undo and redo
- Mark-up pane where you can see a list of all annotations and read all text comments
- Pressure-sensitive ink thickness
- Eraser which erases ink only from touched area and not the whole stroke
- Lasso select, copying and pasting annotations
- Ability to draw ink strokes across pages
- Remember last or set default ink color and thickness
- Button to erase all annotations in document
- I like these suggestions a lot, especially list of annotations/comments, and erase all annotations.
Please improve the search (Ctrl + F) functionality: add "match case" and "match whole word" options, show a list of search results, and a progress indicator - this is needed for large PDF files.
Aditi_Gangwar Please give us the option to disable continuous scrolling. I need the pdf pages to stay within the container and zoom in and out over the same page without worrying about annoyances with differently sized pages of pdfs.
posinhaThanks for the feedback! It is a part of our product backlog and we're continuing to work on it.- Aditi_GangwarThat is something that we're working on as we speak Alexei_Drekker!
Will be out soon 🙂
Please add full touch, pen, and mouse input separation. I have a Surface and I never want to draw with my mouse - I have the pen for that, nor do I ever want to pan with my Surface Pen (I use touch for that), so I would like the PDF reader to distinguish between pen and mouse input in addition to distinguishing touch input, and have the pen always draw, without having to press the "draw" button first, have the mouse always select text, and touch always pan or select text (right now I can't select text in "draw" mode). The Reader app in Windows 8 behaved like this, and it makes perfect sense. I don't understand why you ever abandoned that design.
- Please add a button to go back to the previously viewed page after clicking on a link to another page within a PDF.
- Yeah, that would be great. The last and the only place where I get this is my Kindle.
I would love to have the PDF reader as an application, in its own window, without the navigation top bar, with its own icon, associatable to document files.
- I would be able to set the windows side by side easily
- I would be able to open PDF files from the file system without launching Edge and reloading all the tabs that were open last time I closed.
- I would be able to keep al the open PDF files together in a window, not mingled with the web pages.
- posinhaThank you for these great ideas! We'll definitely evaluate these for our product roadmap.
- Spoiler
Lobotomik wrote:I would love to have the PDF reader as an application, in its own window, without the navigation top bar, with its own icon, associatable to document files.
- I would be able to set the windows side by side easily
- I would be able to open PDF files from the file system without launching Edge and reloading all the tabs that were open last time I closed.
- I would be able to keep al the open PDF files together in a window, not mingled with the web pages.
Use Windows' window snapping feature.
previous tabs reloading? set the correct option here:
edge://settings/onStartup
Don't set it to "Continue where you left off"
nowadays, everything is mixed up. when website developers embed PDFs into their websites, can't expect Edge to not offer a seamless experience.
- That is true, but many people have dozens of PDF documents in their filing systems, and Edge is a poor interface for that. You can make do with the file browser and open in edge, but a dedicated app is more practical, like there is one for photos and another for music.
- I would love you to reinstate the ebook reader capabilities from old Edge. Integrated with the PDF reader in a separate App window, as I suggested before, it could be one of the best document readers available.
What about scrolling experience. Scrolling experience has improved since Improvements in PDF Reader. But as reported here five or six month ago, 4K smooth support- PDFs "When scrolling, the document is white and takes a moment to load". This has stopped me from using Edge as main PDF browser for me. When I scroll down, even in a very slow speed, I always see a stripe of white line and only after a while text appears in that region. Really hope more work is done at scrolling for PDF.
- posinhaThanks for keeping us honest and grounded with your feedback! We're continuously working on improving our scroll experience and would be rolling out some of them soon.
- Any plans to allow for deleting pages from a PDF or combining pages from other PDFs?
- We don’t even need full editing functionality. We have some large documentation PDF’s and often like to just send a few pages to customers so it would be nice to be able to pull out a few pages or delete a few pages that aren’t relevant for what we want to send. Also, we commonly have to merge multiple PDFs into a single file.
- posinhaThanks for the feedback ckits! This is a part of our product backlog and we would try to get on to it soon.
Aditi_Gangwar Hey can you please add the feature to disable continuous scrolling that was in page view in the old Edge. As a musician I use the PDF editor of the browser as a sheet music viewer. In the old Edge I could view single pages of music on the whole screen in vertical viewing mode and change the pages by swiping left or right. Currently this feature is abscent. Thank you
