It is impossible to leave precise instructions without a precision marker feature. I don’t want to highlight what amounts to a cell-I want to highlight punctuation, transpositions, and small areas of illustrations and photos. Also, people can be lazy about reading directions, or they interpret words differently, or they are confused by the current highlighting system. The current feature makes simple corrections laborious to communicate for the editor and difficult to understand for the employee/vendor.

I review lots of drawings and not all text is stored as recognizable text. And the text flow is all over the place sometimes. And I want to highlight lines and regions. A simple free hand, freehand-closed-fill and and an assisted-freehand style highlighting (makes relatively orthogonal strokes aligned) would be helpful. No offence to those who only want to highlight normal flowing text day-in and day-out--my stuff is a lot more exciting.

I detest the freehand highlighter. When actively highlighting, the mark looks much larger than what actually ends up on the page. I use --or, rather, WANT to use-- highlighting for texts downloaded by my professors in my PhD program. Having to repeatedly run the OCR text recognition utility is a pain when trying to read quickly and highlight efficiently. Desperately in need of improvement.

Using a Surface Pro 7 with Windows 11, and employing the stylus or my finger to highlight.

Strange mine worked, Acrobat Pro DC, on unrecognized text until a week or so ago. Now it blocks out everything behind it so I have to go in and lower the transparency. Maddening in a busy day and so utterly unnecessary. I'm assuming this is the result of an update. I'm convinced that in a lot of cases the people that write and update the programs don't really use them like the people that work on them, so they have no idea what customers want. I wish they would fix it back to the way it was. They should also be made to memorize the software golden rule, IF IT ISN'T BROKEN DON'T FIX IT!!!

Several years later, this problem still remains and as a daily user of Adobe DC, I have no understanding why such a simple request has been declined and still not implemented.

On a daily basis I highlight patents that have drawings and text: OCR is nice as it can be searched and the text can be neatly marked, but once OCRed, on both type of pages the DC does not allow for free hand highlighting. It is very annoying. It should be obvious to anyone, that not only horizontal markings are useful.

I have that problem with patents (like hundreds of professionals out there I am sure), but I am equally sure that many other professions (such as lawyers, all kind of engineers, architects, admin staff) will have the same problem.

It does not seem difficult to implement a _toggling_mechanism (Alt?) for the highlighter between a text_bound and freehand.

Yeah, whoever decided the current one was a good idea is a proper dropkick. Only does freehand when it feels in the mood. Sometimes it only does text. Most of the time it does neither, even when there IS recognized text.

The text seems to be recognized by some parts of the program, too, but not by others. Adobe products are increasingly useless.

this feature os the most horrid thing adobe has ever done.

Im ripping my hair out in frustration as all want is straight line highlight - IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

Going back to using nitro

All I've got is the freehand highlighter. I just want to highlight a line of text, not draw all over the page.

This is truly maddening. In a non-scanned document (e.g., a pdf made from a Word or other doc), I want to be able to highlight words, "cursor style," and I also want to be able to highlight other components "blob" style. Every so often in a document of this exact same type that I'm currently working with Acrobat let's me do it. But never with any kind of predictability. And now I come to see that people below have been begging for this feature for years. Isn't there a way to toggle between the two highlight styles? There has to be. Please. Somebody. Anybody. Help!!

How can I change highlight cover for a scanned document that I am working on?

Bluebeam Revu has this feature.

On scanned documents with hand-written text the Highlight text tool automatically changes from blob to the I cursor and the selected text is separated to letter by letter. I know I can use the Drawing tool and change the opacity to 40% but then it's so frustrating to change from this kind of highlighting and drawing with 100% opacity. There should be a separate icon/tool for ALWAYS-FREEHAND-HIGHLIGHTING or it should be possible to change to enforce the blob cursor when holding down the CTRL or SHIFT key. Please.

I scan vintage railroad timetable maps. These maps show railroad routes through and across states, with stops (town names) listed along each route. The town names are generally perpendicular to the curving routes, and are therefore listed at all possible angles on the scanned page. On the pdf, I'm trying to freehand highlight towns for which I have corresponding photographs.

1. Finding out how to set the properties of the highlight tool took me forever (highlight first, then right click "Properties", and then set.
2. After some successful highlighting, something mysterious changed -- the highlight tool would ONLY execute perfectly horizontal highlights (useless for me in this case) -- and displayed absolutely zero information on how to reset the tool for freehand highlighting)
3. PLEASE make this tool quickly accessible and easily and proactively customizable.

I actually asked for this feature and it was declined: https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/18813292-use-the-drawing-tools-to-highlight-objects.

This still does not work for me, it never has. Is this supposed to work in all versions of Acrobat including Adobe Acrobat XI?

Hi Steve. Thank you for reaching out to us.
Highlight is supported over images and scanned PDF's as well.
Please let us know if you are still facing any issue in highlighting over images or scanned PDF's.

Prior to my latest update I too was able to use the freehand highlighter. For non text recognizable files the highlight tool would automatically switch to the freehand highlight vs the regular one for text recognized files. I can not find a setting nor a separate tool after the update which allows freehand highlight of non text recognizable scanned images

something like this? http://evermap.com/AutoInk.asp (I'm not promoting a product, just pointing out what's already out there)

I agree. And like in redaction it would be nice to be able to toggle between the freehand and text selecting highlighter tool.

I don't think it was ever added.