Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Text Edits tool is MIA in Acrobat X

The best way to make editorial comments in versions of Adobe Acrobat prior to version 10 (version X) is with the Text Edits tool, located in the Commenting toolbar. With this single commenting tool you can indicate that text should be deleted, replaced, inserted, highlighted, or have a note attached.

But look high and low in Acrobat X, and you'll be disappointed. In the Annotations panel you'll see separate tools for deleting, replacing, inserting, highlighting, or adding a note to text. But the handy all-in-one Text Edits tool is nowhere to be found.

As it turns out, they've merged the functionality of the TextEdits tool in Acrobat X with the Selection tool.

Just select some text with the Selection tool, then ctrl-click (Macintosh) or right-click (Windows) and choose Highlight Text, Cross Out Text, Replace Text, or Add Note to Text from the context menu that appears.

Once you know about the functionality of the Selection tool, you won't miss the Text Edits tool. But it's sure disconcerting when a familiar workflow is turned on its head!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

All that does is adds a comments box, leaves the existing text in place with a blue line going through it. To actually edit the text: Choose Tools > Content > Edit Document Text

Keith Gilbert said...

@Anonymous: True, but the purpose of the Text Edits tool in previous versions of Acrobat was to add editorial comments to text. This functionality is now moved to the Selection tool.

bill33k said...

In Adobe 9, you can replace text by (1) highlighting the text and once selected replace the text by (2) typing or using control +v. In addition, in 9, if you searched for a word, once it was highlighted you could simply start typing--no clicking! Now, in Acrobat 10, it appears that you must (1) select the word, (2) right click, (3) click replace text and then (4) type. And if you search for a word and it is highlighted, you still must select (click) the word to replace it. Is there a way in 10 to do what you did in 9 without the additional 2 or 3 clicks? In a long document where there are many replacements, reducing the clicks would be a huge time saver. Thanks.

Keith Gilbert said...

@bill33k: I feel your pain. I don't know of any way to make this simpler in Acrobat X, sorry.

Arran said...

Thanx for the helpful info, but you could save yourself some typing in your next article. I doubt there are any Mac users left in the world that don't have a two button mouse (capable of right-click).

Chris L said...

Thanks for that! I would never have known the select tool now had everything built in otherwise.

Rob Harris said...

Thank you. This is most helpful (and, I hate to admit, a little obvious). If it were a snake....

Anonymous said...

Hi. I found that the original three-way Text Edit tool is still alive and hiding in A X, and can be brought up with the shortcut key E.
However, this seems to be a sick joke from Adobe, as it seems you first have to enable the single-key shortcuts in Preferences (Use Single-Key Accelerators To Access Tools option in General preferences).
Now you hit E, get the tool you thought you paid for, but of course if you start typing the replacement text, all the other shortcut keys are active and the operation becomes a farce.
If it were possible to only have the shortcuts activated in combination with "Ctrl +", but it looks like customizing the shortcuts is not possible...
Losing productivity here for apparently no good reason.