Apple Pencil 2 Text Highlighting Behavior

Hey y’all!

I’m more or less satisfied with Chromium Edge’s built in PDF reader for my MacBook Pro, but not with my interaction with the iPad app.

So, I use a 12.9" iPad Pro with the PaperPile app to read papers (still on my 30 day trial, but liking it) with the Apple Pencil 2 in hand. I mostly have the highlighter tool selected while reading. One annoyance I’m dealing with since the beginning of my trial is that selecting text to highlight with the Pencil 2 is not precise.

Each time I place the pencil tip on the first word of the phrase and then drag, the actual highlighting begins with the second word/token in the selected range of text. I have been able to replicate this almost a 100 percent of times. And this happens with modern, fresh off the press born-digital PDFs (I could understand it to be a PDF formatting problem if it were some old OCR’d texts).

However, simply selecting text (with the highlighter tool off) is precise as it should be. Using a finger to highlight works fine too. There’s something off with how the app’s built-in PDF reader interacts with the Apple Pencil 2.

I wonder if others are facing the same problem.

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@nve - just wanted to confirm here I’ve passed on your feedback to our mobile dev and added it to a specific topic on our tracker. There have been some other reported ‘kinks’ related to Apple Pencil / stylus usage which we hope to look into and work out when able.

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