Text Box vs Typewriter tool

Luke Shiras

I finally figured out the best use for the typewriter tool.

In the past, I've exclusively used Bluebeam for markups with the occasional form to fill out. Since most of my forms had built-in fields, filling them out was pretty easy. And those that didn't only had a few lines to enter manually.

But recently I had some other forms to fill out that had a lot of lines of text to enter, so I gave the Typewriter tool a try. Turns out, this was the right choice.

The text box is simple to use and is ideal for paragraphs where you click the boundary you want to type in and just go to town. When you want another paragraph somewhere, you can copy, paste, and edit or start over.

But with the Typewriter tool, simply click the cursor and start typing. Ready to type on another line on the form, click and type. Repeat as needed. Now, imagine using Text Boxes vs the Typewriter Tool for the form below.

Shaya Birnbaum

Very interesting @Luke Shiras. Totally agree, the Typewriter tool is by far the easiest way to handle a form like this. I used to use it for pretty much all my markups too, until I realized you can’t add leaders with it. That’s when I changed to Text Boxes.

But for forms or anywhere you just need to drop in text and keep moving, Typewriter is perfect.