Unable to mark up a PDF in Mail on my 4th Gen iPad Pro 12.9

Attached below is a copy of a complaint describing a major flaw in Apple's iOS. The complaint was written nearly 4 years ago and posted to this web page. I am currently experiencing the identical problem. I am a professor at the Berklee College of Music and I use a 4th gen. iPad Pro, 12.9 inch tablet to grade student homework and projects. Homework and projects are sent to me in the form of PDF's via Apple's Mail client. There, I can open them, grade them, and send them back to the student without ever leaving Mail. Very convenient when it works. However, seemingly at random, the program blinks on and off for a split second and when it comes back on, all of my annotations are lost and unrecoverable. It's so frustrating that I've had to resort to printing out hard copy rendering the iPad useless. It's so bad, I'm considering dumping Apple. I am losing hours of work. It's hard to believe that it's been nearly 4 years and Apple has not addressed this issue especially when you consider the fact that Apple has always prided itself as a company who caters to educators.

The blinking on and off phenomenon seems to occur when, as I am writing with the Apple Pencil, the palm of my hand makes contact with the edge of the screen. However, I can't be certain this is the trigger because the blinking phenomenon doesn't occur every time my palm makes contact with the edge of the screen.

CreativeWrit Author Level 1•13points

Disappearing annotations on PDF mark-up

I suspect I'm running into a recurring instability issue with the default pdf mark-up software on the iPad Pro. Occasionally (at random), the iPad's screen will flash, and all my annotations will disappear (I am a teacher; Iam grading essays). My expectation is that my work is being saved to iCloud (so Ican simply recover an earlier version of the file). Nope! iCloud has only the current, "new" version of the pdf (tiny file size, no annotations included). This si infuriating. Now Imust stop my annotating at random intervals to manually save to G-Drive just ni case the iPad decides to erase my work. Not ideal.

My guess is that the iPad is dumping RAM or "refreshing" its mark-up program to deal with some memory bleed (or whatever, I'm not a coder), but the result is catastrophic (hours of work gone). tI makes the device unreliable as a paper-grading replacement. Ihave heard anecdotal evidence of this occurring in Acrobat, too, suggesting an issue with the device's firmware/OS background apps, rather than the mark-up software itself.

Please, please, please build into a future update extra redundancy for annotations--saving a temp file somewhere local would screen of death" nightmares of the 90s on Windows machines. But the result here is the same--loss of work. Also, on the default pdf mark-up software, please allow me to remove/hide the navigation bar on the right of the screen. I'd like

to use that space for annotations. Currently, Imust zoom in to free up that space, but with how unstable the app is Iworry that all my zooming and scrolling contributes to the appearance of the refresh bug.

Ilove my iPad and Apple Pencil otherwise. Thanks for listening, Apple tech folks!

-Ben

iPad Pro 12.9-inch, 3rd Gen, Wi-Fi

Posted on Jun 28, 2020 11:49 AM

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