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Right now it is very cool that if I set the pen to perfect white, and give it a large width, I can use it like an eraser that will affect the original PDF, not just the annotations. And I like how it changes to match the background tone.
But it is clumsy and time consuming to change both the color and the size of the pen to do this. And then change it back afterwards.
It would be really nice to have an option to make the regular eraser work this way. Obviously you'd need to be able to turn it on or off, but I do 90% of my annotation erasing via the undo key, so I don't use the regular eraser very often. Whereas the need to erase something in the original chart happens all the time....
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03-12-2023, 05:04 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-12-2023, 05:06 PM by McAroni.)
You could save every preset for your pen or other Tool in the favourites. After setting up your pen Go to the Star ar the top panel and press the plus Icon. You will have access to your saved favourites there, or through the command Bar.
If you have an spen you could sign the Button to switch to the eraser, and if you release the Button it switches back. This is in my opinion the fastest way to access and leave the eraser
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(03-12-2023, 04:03 PM)woodslanding Wrote: Right now it is very cool that if I set the pen to perfect white, and give it a large width, I can use it like an eraser that will affect the original PDF, not just the annotations. And I like how it changes to match the background tone.
But it is clumsy and time consuming to change both the color and the size of the pen to do this. And then change it back afterwards.
It would be really nice to have an option to make the regular eraser work this way. Obviously you'd need to be able to turn it on or off, but I do 90% of my annotation erasing via the undo key, so I don't use the regular eraser very often. Whereas the need to erase something in the original chart happens all the time....
I set up 5 actions on demand:
Write: pen on screen.
Undo: stylus button.
Erase annotations: screen 2-finger tap.
White-out original marks: screen 3-finger tap set for Highlighter, which I set for opacity 100%, color white or off-white. I wish there were a color picker to match non-white backgrounds.
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Color picker is a good suggestion. +1
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Are you both saying you would like one of the shortcut options to be to select a different color for the active tool is the tool supports a color?
Thanks,
Mike
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Hey Mike,
No, I was referring to what woodslanding said in the beginning. Sorry that I was a bit unclear. I meant that it would be possible to select a place in the document that is the background color and define this as the color for the tool. Then we could use that as "eraser" to clean up untidy places in the scan. This could either be a new tool or (easier) just a color selection for the existing pen tool.
I hope this makes it a bit clearer?
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Yeah, the reason I didn't include that with the annotations redesign is that all color selections are now done through the color selection dialog. So things get a little awkward with trying to support a "dropper" to pick the color from somewhere on the page, as the dialog is modal (meaning it has to be dismissed before you can go back to interacting with other parts of the UI). So I would probably have to have a separate way to support this, such as having a little dropper icon next to every color selection square on all of the different popups. If that icon is tapped, all UI elements would have to be hidden, and MobileSheets would have to enter a mode where it's waiting for the user to tap anywhere on the page to get the color. The only way to get out of it is to tap or press the tablet back button. This will require a lot of changes to support though, and I haven't really gotten any requests for it before, so I wasn't sure how important it was to users. It's good to know there are at least some users that would get some benefit from this though, so I can add it to the list of things to do.
Mike
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Hello Mike,
having read your comment, and thought some more about the specific situations where I need something like that, I wanted to add something:
I was thinking about specific situations that occur very often with scans of music that have two kinds of flaws: a) markings by a former user that don't apply to me or look extremely untidy and b) artifacts from scanning like black bits around the sides of the scan. In these cases it is very handy to have a tool to "white out" these flawed areas. I already use a favorite of the pen with color white and size 20 and a second one with size 5 for more delicate edges around stuff I want to keep.
While there may be situations in which a different color than white is needed, most of the time the standard white color is the right choice. If I choose to change the background color, it might behave wrongly with a song I already treated with a whitening tool which doesn't change the color with the changed background.
Considering this, you seem to already have some kind of logic to determine the background color and this could be automatically set as the color of a new tool I would suggest and might be called "whitening eraser". Another benefit of this would be that the "whitening eraser" would not interfere with other annotations because it could be drawn in front of the pdf (or image) but behind other annotations. It would be a lot easier to use because we would not have to adjust sizes and colors as much but instead would only have to switch between the special eraser tool and the pen tool. There are already 3 different modes of erasers and this could just be the new fourth one perhaps?
So all of this does not actually touch the color picker. The additional thinking about it made that clear for me. Having one might still be useful, but actually not that high priority for me, as most pdfs come in just black and white and the only colored things are my annotations for which I hopefully have a way of reproducing the colors without a new color picker tool
