Surface pen no longer able to highlight the article

Anonymous
2017-11-06T04:35:32+00:00

I use the surface pen to do personal reading as well as highlighting on the article. However, recently I suddenly cannot do the highlighting  anymore. Each time I tried to highlight, the pen dragged the screen to the next page. Is this the problem with the pen or the application software?

Moved from:      Surface / Surface Pro 4 / Display and screen

Surface | Accessories | Surface Pen

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous
2017-11-13T21:35:21+00:00

Hi Swee,

I think what you are seeing are some Pen interaction improvements that were made in the Fall Creators update. 

**Scrolling with pen.**In the effort to create a more intuitive pen interaction on Windows, we are emphasizing natural and direct manipulation of content with pen. You don’t have to “hunt and peck” for scrollbars or frequently switch between pen and touch when navigating; now you can scroll content directly and fluently as you would with your finger.

**Selection with pen.**We also revised selection with pen by giving it more control over the selection process. Not only are we showing selection grippers whenever text is selected via pen, but also are allowing for a consistent and fast selection of content – text, objects, or ink—by dragging the pen while the barrel button is pressed.

For example, if you are in Edge or a Store app you can now select text by quickly double tapping a word and then dragging the selection grippers to adjust the words highlighted OR you can press and hold the pen's barrel button while you highlight the desired text.

Hope this helps,

Greg

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-01-16T15:57:11+00:00

    I rolled back too, problem solved.  Annotative use (highlighting, etc) should be an option for pen use.   Maybe Microsoft wants to have a selection item in the settings for "creative" use or "annotative" use.  For those of us that purchased a surface for reading and studying purposes, this "creative" update almost nullifies the usefulness of Surface Pro in tablet mode.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-01-16T15:34:55+00:00

    This does not help with the highlighting issue.  For many, using the pen to highlight when reading articles is an important feature.  This new update all but eliminates this.  We should have an option to allow basic highlighting - document annotation rather than raw content creation.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-01-16T14:09:13+00:00

    Finally i have rollback to the previous version of windows 10 and the highlighting works as usual :

    To uninstall the Fall Creators Update, go to Start > Settings and click on Update & Security.

    Click the Recovery link on the left and then click on Get started under 'Go back to the previous version of Windows 10.'

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-01-16T13:33:28+00:00

    It doesn't work at all on tablets that don't have that right click button:

    Here's a video:  https://twitter.com/adamzea/status/952934642176462849?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

    On tablets that do have a right click button such as the Surface, having to hold that down is hugely frustrating. You have to change the way you hold the pen, hold the button down, hold the pen against the screen, and move it across the screen. That's a huge amount of work compared to how simple it used to be. Furthermore, after you get the text selection to where it should be, another right click is supposed to bring up the context sensitive menu allowing you to copy the selected text. Unfortunately, often that right click causes the selection to change, thus ruining all of that work I spent frustratingly trying to make the selection. It's a huge regression and makes Windows 10 pen tablets practically unusable.

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