highlight whole words

[iguana2]

Hello,

when studying texts, I use the highlight function a lot. However, when highlighting several consecutive words, I have to position the mouse precisely at the beginning of the first word before pressing the mouse button, and then precisely at the end of the last word before releasing it (otherwise, the first and the last word is only party highlighted which doesn't look well). This positioning is quite tiring, and I can't imagine why someone would deliberately want to highlight only part of the first and the last word when trying to highlight several words.

So, my question is:
1a) Ideally, could highlighting of several words be modified so that, by default, both the first and last word gets completely highlighted, even if pressing and relasing the mouse button is done in the middle of the first and last word?
1b) Or, alternatively, could there be a way to optionally highlight whole words, e.g. by pressing Ctrl while pressing the mouse button? (Maybe there already is a way to do just that?)

Then there are two smaller issues when highlighting a single word using a double click:
2) it would be nice if that also worked for words that are "hyphe-
nated" at the end on one line, and continue in the next line.
3) Unfortunately the double click does not quite work on words with German "umlauts" such as ä, ö, ü: Apparently, in PDFs, a word like "beschäftigt" is saved as "besch¨aftigt" (using the \u00a8 diaeresis + the latin small letter "a" instead of the correct Unicode character \u00e4 "ä"). Now, when I double click on the first part, only "beschä" gets highlighted. When I double click on the second part, only "äftigt" gets highlighted. Can this be resolved?

Regards
iguana

[David.P]

Yes please, and +1. See the almost same feature request here (with video) from 2011
Regards
--

Link creation (and text highlighting) in Acrobat v.7

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi guys,

So, my question is:
1a) Ideally, could highlighting of several words be modified so that, by default, both the first and last word gets completely highlighted, even if pressing and relasing the mouse button is done in the middle of the first and last word?
1b) Or, alternatively, could there be a way to optionally highlight whole words, e.g. by pressing Ctrl while pressing the mouse button? (Maybe there already is a way to do just that?)

I can place a feature request for consideration. I don't believe that it should be too difficult, but it's ultimately up to the devs.

2) it would be nice if that also worked for words that are "hyphe-
nated" at the end on one line, and continue in the next line.

This is not quite as simple as it may appear, as content in a PDF does not follow a logical flow as it would in e.g. a text or Word document. It's all coordinate based, so while it visually appears to be a single, hyphenated word, there isn't actually anything linking the two together. I don't actually know of any application that does this. I'll put in a request, but I suspect that it may not be viable.

3) Unfortunately the double click does not quite work on words with German "umlauts" such as ä, ö, ü: Apparently, in PDFs, a word like "beschäftigt" is saved as "besch¨aftigt" (using the \u00a8 diaeresis + the latin small letter "a" instead of the correct Unicode character \u00e4 "ä"). Now, when I double click on the first part, only "beschä" gets highlighted. When I double click on the second part, only "äftigt" gets highlighted. Can this be resolved?

Can you send a sample file? It may well depend on the font used in the file, or the way that it was created.

Thanks,

[iguana2]

Hi Will,

thank you so much for your quick reply!

highlight whole words

I can place a feature request for consideration

To get this feature would help me GREATLY (i.e. highlighting would be a lot faster and, more importantly, put less strain on tendon sheaths). So, yes, please place a request!

Just to explain why this is so important to me: I am using this for my studies, and on my last 634-pages-document, I created a total of 11.226 highlights = 18 highlighted passages or words per page. And there are many more long documents to study … I first used Acr*bat Reader DC, but as soon as you reach 4.000+ highlights, the program gets incredibly slow and memory-consuming (despite 32,0 GB RAM). I think they are creating "physical" UI control elements for each annotation (visible or not), each annotation requiring approx. 35 KB of RAM. That was why I started looking for alternatives.

hyphenated words

This is not quite as simple as it may appear … It's all coordinate based

I don't actually know of any application that does this

This works quite well in Acr*bat Reader DC (not always, but whenever selecting or highlighting several line of text works, this works, too). It's a far less important issue, though.

double click … on words with German "umlauts"

Can you send a sample file? It may well depend on the font used in the file, or the way that it was created

Ah, you are right, when I create a PDF from a Word document with PDF creator, this problem does not occur. I attach a sample file in which it does occur: try highlighting by double clicking "erläutert" (line 1) or "benötigt" (line 4).

Thanks
iguana

[iguana2]

Hi,

meanwhile, I did some self-testing to quantify the advantage an "auto-snapping to word boundaries" (as in Acr*bat Reader DC) has over "manual mouse positioning" (as currently in PDF-XChange Editor): I wrote a tool that measures the average "mouse down duration" and with that, I continued to read and highlight the documents I am studying. Here's the result:

* with "manual mouse positioning" (in PDF-XChange Editor), mouse down actions when highlighting text took me an average of 1.40 sec. (standard deviation σ = 0.63 sec.).
* with "auto-snapping to word boundaries" (in Acr*bat Reader DC), mouse down actions when highlighting text took me an average of 0.85 sec. (standard deviation σ = 0.53 sec.).

I created 300 highlights in each program. So, in my case, the additional time for manually positioning the mouse at the end of the last word is 0.55 sec. Presumably, an extra 0.55 sec. must be added for positioning the mouse at the beginning of the first word (since this is done before the mouse button is pressed, and my tool only measures mouse down duration). Therefore, the difference is about 1.1 sec. for each highlighting action. Moreove, my mouse hand is much more relaxed with auto-snapping as I just need to hit the (first/final) word of the passage I want to highlight - rather than the first/last character of the passage.

So, I really hope your developers agree to include "auto-snapping to word boundaries". If anyone wants to test for themselves, you are welcome - I attached a zip file with the source code of my (C#) "mouse down duration" measuring tool, also including the executable (subfolder bin\Release\MouseDownDuration.exe, Windows with .NET Framework 4.5.2 required)

Regards
iguana

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hello iguana,

Thank you for performing these extensive tests. The feature requests are under consideration. Given the amount of support for this request I doubt it will be rejected.

Thank you for your time and patience.

[iguana2]

Hello Patrick,

excellent, thanks for your reply!

iguana

[David.P]

Well done with those tests, iguana.

I fully agree that this feature would substantially improve the ergonomic quality of PDF-XChange Editor, and over the day would save a lot of time that is currently spent due to the need for an exact positioning of the mouse both at the beginning and at the end of a text selection (or text highlight), every time you select or highlight text.

Regards
David

[iguana2]

Hello David,

thank you, also for posting the link to the original request! The phrase "auto-snapping to word boundaries" in that request expresses in 5 words what I tried to explain in loong sentences

So, hopefully we will find this feature in an upcoming update! I like PDF-XChange Editor much better than "Reader DC": Yes, their new user interface looks really nice, but when I actually started working with Reader DC, I soon missed configuration options, such as creating menu buttons and shortcuts for my preferred highlighting styles - easily done in PDF-XChange Editor!

Regards
iguana

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Thanks you all for the comments!

As Patrick said - given the feedback for this feature - it is unlikely it will be rejected!

Cheers,
Stefan

[michael805]

Hi! Great product. I just wanted to follow up on the excellent posts below. Has this feature been implemented? Thank you!

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hi michael,

The highlighting does now push past the edge of the work, you can double click on a word and have something that looks like this (With the highlighter

or highlight from beginnning to end manually.
There is also the option to Drag a selection box around what you'd like to highlight.

Moreso accomplishing what you are looking for.
Hope this helps!

[michael805]

Hi Daniel - Actually, that is not what I was looking for. The posts here discuss the ability to highlight whole words (i.e., more than a single word at a time). My use case is very similar to iguana2's: I am making a lot of highlights on PDFs. Please reread the posts below ("auto-snapping to word boundaries"), including DavidP's . Stefan seemed to indicate that this feature was forthcoming.

Thanks for your reply,
Michael

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Oh Sorry, I'll admit i skipped to the most recent posts and hoped a quick guess would be enough, rereading it now. I've gone and looked for the feature request and brought some light back to it, the Devs are going to look into it again, seems it got buried in the midst of all the updates we've gone through.

So it doesn't look like its in yet, but ill keep an ear and eye out for you.

[michael805]

Thank you! I really appreciate it. It seems minor, but I consider this really helpful. Implementing it will save a bunch of time over the long run. It would be really nice to be able to make toggle this as the default behavior in Preferences.

Best,
Michael

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

[David.P]

Hi @all,

great to see that this is again taken care of! I was only going to mention that the feature in question can be seen in the below video (as already linked further above) -- probably best if maximized:
https://youtu.be/NnvIH4KhLnE?t=88

Hth and cheers
David

[John - Tracker Supp]

thanks David

[michael805]

Do you have a rough timeline of when this feature will be implemented? Thank you for your help!

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

so it probably wont be in this upcoming build, nor the next one, We're focusing more on bug fixes since we just rolled out a major version release a month ago, Once we are back on the new feature train ill bring it up again. until then though, we'll all just have to cross our fingers

[michael805]

Thanks for the update, Daniel. Fingers crossed on a quick implementation!

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Same here