Highlighting is far too difficult to keep straight

[soundsgoodtome 155]

Thought I'd open a scanned PDF and use Skitch to highlight passages. But it's virtually impossible to draw a straight line of highlighting across a line of text. Sadly, for anything other than free-hand drawing, the highlighting feature in its present incarnation is completely unusable.

 

Highlighting should (optionally) work the way it works to draw an arrow: You click at point A, then drag across to point B, and once you're satisfied that the line is straight, you hit enter to confirm and have the line drawn. Better yet, it'd be great to click a checkbox that constrains all lines horizontally (or vertically, as may be needed).

 

(And though i'm posting this in the Mac section, similar changes should be implemented on iOS devices, as well.)

 

Thanks.

[Joe Lopez 108]

@soundsgoodtome - On the Mac you can hold SHIFT while using the highlighter (or pen) and draw a straight line. Additionally while holding SHIFT you can rotate the shape in 45* increments.

[soundsgoodtome 155]

@soundsgoodtome - On the Mac you can hold SHIFT while using the highlighter (or pen) and draw a straight line. Additionally while holding SHIFT you can rotate the shape in 45* increments.

 

Great news! Thanks!

 

Now that I'm able to draw a straight line, I've noticed something else:

 

Is it also possible to adjust the degree to which the highlighter "masks" the original text? I may not be using the correct term, but instead of just colorizing the white space around the text the user is highlighting, the highlighter lightens the black text, making it look "gray" and "washed out."

 

Other PDF highlighters (including that in Preview.app and others) do not do this. They colorize the background, while leaving the black text black.

 

[Joe Lopez 108]

At this time you cannot change the transparency level. 

[soundsgoodtome 155]

At this time you cannot change the transparency level. 

 

Then, for me, Skitch is regrettably unusable.

[justrhysism 0]

Why isn't the SHIFT-for-straight-line feature available on Windows?

[CollegeStudent27 0]

Why isn't the SHIFT-for-straight-line feature available on Windows?

+1

[Thatcher Mathias 2]

The last time this thread was addressed was a year ago, so not sure anyone will see this, but...

On a Mac, when you hold Shift, it creates a fixed length line.  Which then has to be edited to the correct length.  The length of the line is the same regardless of whether it goes clean off the page or not.

 

You still (two years later) can not adjust the transparency of a highlighter.

 

This is pretty basic functionality - are you not developing this tool any more?  I am going to have to annotate in a different program and then import, which is really annoying when I'm supposed to have an integrated tool.

[deardavid 6]

I agree.  Very little functionality in the way highlighting is implemented.  I have Chrome on Win 7 desktop.  Shift to produce straight line would be great, but when highlight color masks out the text overly much, then what good is it. Skitch is worse in this regard than Evernote Web Clipper, but neither of them have the required functionality.  This would be a very hand feature of Skitch and Evernote if it worked!   I notice than green and red work a little better in the Web Clipper than yellow.  Also, the page that gets captured by the initial screen shot looks blurry or slightly pixilated, as though it were captured at too low a resolution -- apparently this is due to the initial display being less than 100% zoom after capturing -- after adjusting to 100% it looks OK again.  Why not make 100% the default?

 

   Thanks for thinking about these issues.  I look forward to being able to use these features as they were obviously intended to be implemented.

 

   David

[Morten Hamborg 2]

On 29 May 2015 at 11:00 AM, Thatcher Mathias said:

The last time this thread was addressed was a year ago, so not sure anyone will see this, but...

On a Mac, when you hold Shift, it creates a fixed length line.  Which then has to be edited to the correct length.  The length of the line is the same regardless of whether it goes clean off the page or not.

 

You still (two years later) can not adjust the transparency of a highlighter.

 

This is pretty basic functionality - are you not developing this tool any more?  I am going to have to annotate in a different program and then import, which is really annoying when I'm supposed to have an integrated tool.

Just wanted to say that this is still a problem, and a VERY basic feature.

I upgraded to Evernote Premium today and beside space, annotating documents directly in Evernote was a big factor for upgrading. Really disappointing that they still haven't addressed this issue - it really looks awful!
Can we somehow make them aware of this basic feature?
The difference between annotating in Evernote and Preview on Mac is pretty clear:

[logam11 8]

I encountered the same issue. The tip to draw a straight line using "Shift" key is useful, but the transparency is annoying.

A workaround on the Mac is to preview the PDF in Apple Preview and highlight. The highlighting yellow color is not pretty or adjustable, but it doesn't lessen opacity like Evernote. One caveat: after I highlighted in Preview, some of the selectable text in my PDF got scrambled. Letters mysteriously went missing. Sigh...

[humanengr 53]

The straight-line aspect of this could be addressed across all platforms by adding a low-opacity version of the straight-line tool to the shape palette.

Presumably that would be a simple implementation.

Thoughts, Evernoters?

 

[humanengr 53]

Another q: Does anyone see any benefit from the freehand highlighter?

From all comments above, it's obviously not of much use for highlighting text.

The only purpose I can see for that is to draw a free-hand shape on a graphic without totally hiding what's underneath. But for that, one can pretty much accomplish the same effect by using the opaque freehand line in a thin width. 

Just mulling. Thoughts?