I've been using Adobe Acrobat Pro to review and mark up engineering drawings, and I wanted to share my experience with the latest release.

Today I needed to perform a very simple task: add a double-ended dimension arrow and a text label to a PDF drawing. What should have taken around two minutes instead took well over half an hour.

The main issue was not a lack of functionality, but that the functionality was extremely difficult to discover.

The ⋯ button on the toolbar opens Customize Toolbar, which naturally led me to believe that this was where I needed to add the drawing tools. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand why I could see tools such as Line, Arrow and Rectangle in the customization dialog, but could not add them to the toolbar because the Add button was disabled. It was completely unclear that these tools already existed elsewhere.

Eventually I discovered that the drawing tools are hidden behind a tool called Draw, which I only found by using the search box. This wasn't obvious from the interface, and I don't think many users would intuitively think to search for "Draw" simply to find basic markup tools.

Once I had found the drawing tools, I was able to create an arrow, but even then the workflow was confusing. It wasn't immediately obvious that a double-ended arrow is created by changing the Start and End properties separately. The terminology (Open, Closed, Reverse, Butt, Slash, etc.) is not self-explanatory for users who simply want an arrow at each end.

Adding text was equally frustrating. I found multiple text tools with similar names—Add Text Comment, Text Callout, and other annotation options—but they behaved differently and it was difficult to determine which one was appropriate. The text editing toolbar also appeared to have very limited formatting capabilities. I couldn't find a straightforward way to make text bold or change its colour, both of which are common requirements when marking up technical drawings.

My overall impression is that the interface has become significantly harder to learn than previous versions. Simple engineering review tasks now require users to search for hidden tools, interpret unfamiliar terminology, and work around interface limitations.

Adobe Acrobat is widely used by engineers, architects and designers to review PDF drawings. I believe the markup tools would benefit from being much more discoverable, with a dedicated, clearly labelled drawing toolbar and consistent text formatting options.

I hope this feedback is helpful. I think Acrobat remains an excellent PDF viewer and editor, but the markup experience for technical drawing review has become unnecessarily complex and time-consuming.