Highlighting errors Web vs. Android app

I read and highlight a lot of older, scanned materials. The highlighting doesn’t work well, not being aligned with the text, skipping parts, often selecting the whole page thus far. Similar to issues documented at [bug] Highlighting doesn't highlight what I select . The answer I’ve read is that it’s an issue with the pdf.

What I just found out is that the highlighting works flawlessly in the Paperpile Android app. I can highlight the same document, and the exact same words in the two and it works fine on Android, but not on the web.

I’m now reading on my computer with my phone also open in front of me. When I get to something I want to highlight, I switch to my phone to do it.

I’m curious why highlighting works so much better than the web app? And wanted to share the workaround with anyone else who struggles with buggy highlighting.

Thanks for the feedback, @Chante. Our mobile and web viewers are different entities, unrelated to each other except for the team’s choosing of each. Details escape me but the sum of it is the technology behind our mobile viewer is better equipped for processing of OCR / scanned material than the web version, resulting in the difference you’re experiencing.

I’m afraid I don’t have any suggestions to share for the time being, but am glad that at least the more recent mobile experience is going smoothly. Both viewers are still in beta and under continuous development so we intend on bringing both up to par over future updates.