Doesn’t highlight PDF books properly – Bluefire Reader Review

The app is pretty good overall but it doesn’t highlight text properly in PDF books. This is a serious flaw if you read textbooks or other books you want to highlight a lot. The problem is that, when you hold your finger on a word, the app is very slow to recognize that you are trying to begin highlighting (up to several seconds) and you have to place your finger exactly over the first letter of the word (not anywhere on the word). If you don’t manage to do this - my success rate is maybe 50% after weeks of practice - you may not be able to manually reposition the cursor to begin at the first letter before the highlight feature disengages. After you highlight several short passages the app seems to get “fatigued” and it can take up to 10 seconds for the highlight to register. You also can’t delete a highlight on the page - you have to go into the notes section and find the page where the highlight is, which is very time-consuming. Also, if you don’t manage to exactly hit the first letter of a word but do manage to manually drag the cursor to the beginning of the word, the notes section doesn’t recognize that you want to start the highlighting at a point earlier than where you first put your finger, and cuts off the first part of the word. Highlighting on the Bluefire app is Kafkaesque. It’s completely baffling how a developer could get a basic feature so wrong. I have no problem highlighting PDFs using the iOS Kindle, GoodReader, or Apple Books apps, but those apps don’t work with Adobe DRM protected PDFs. If these apps can get it right, it’s not clear why Bluefire can’t.
Review by breitenrain5 on Bluefire Reader.