The worst smudged fineliners were the Pentel and the Faber castell ones. The mildliners smudged ALL of these pens to some degree (even though it is hard to see on the image) except for the cheapest ballpoint Staedtler pen – here there was no smudge! I highlighted each word after 10 seconds. Inexpensive Staedtler Stick 430M ballpoint pen.I tested how the Mildliners smudged the following pens: But the results were inconsistent with that. In theory this test should be easy as all these writing pens are supposed to be water-proof, light proof and what have you (apart from the brand-less black gel pen I found on my husband’s desk). The first one is related to how mildliners behave when highlighting a variety of writing pens that bullet journalists use often! This is something that can happen depending on the color of the pen used. The best ones here seem to be for me the Sharpie highlighter and the Staples Hype highlighter followed by Stabilo boss. Even totally inexpensive pens such as crayolas look so much better. I am not particularly impressed at how the mildliners perform here. While many people don’t like the aesthetics of it, what worries me is the fact that mildliners could bleed on the other side of the paper. The saturation of the mildliners leaves a trace where you can clearly see that two (or more) strokes have overlapped. Saturation occurs when you add one (or more) stroke(s) on top of another stroke or when 2 strokes of ink overlap on the paper.īecause the chisel of the Mildliners are particularly small compared to other highlighter pens it is likely that you will experience some saturation when trying to highlight or decorate something. My thought is that by using the mildliner zebra pen on normal paper you would see very minimum ghosting and bleeding in a worse case scenario. It is impossible to look only at the pen and decide that it is non-bleeding. So, this only confirms the opinion that ink bleeding should always be analyzed as a combination of paper and pen. On my thicker notebooks I saw no signs of bleeding, even when I layered ink with a few strokes (which you are not supposed to do). Note that none of the other highlighters had that problem, though! I also tested the pens on normal printing paper, in case you are highlighting text for school, and the results were the same some ink colors, especially the darker mildliner shades, showed bleeding at the end and start of the stroke. Maped (a highlighter I got locally in my town)Īs you can see from the image there is slight ink ghosting on the other side of the paper, and a tiny little bit of bleeding from the beginning and end of the stroke where they saturate the paper a little more.To see how mildliner performs regarding bleeding and ghosting I compared them with variety of highlighters and pens. I have tested these pens on my Flying Tiger notebook, which is an inexpensive journal with rather thin pages. Let’s see how they perform on my notebook. The good news, however, is that by being water based these pens hold a chance with most common papers. Normal copy paper rarely has a high paper and fiber density to avoid ghosting and bleeding completely. While some brands suggest that for best results you should use the pens on tracing paper or premium printing paper, like the Tombow Dual Brush pens, it really doesn’t make sense to test these pens on fancy paper as mostly we will use them in normal copy paper. To test for ghosting and bleeding is super important because most of us use these pens to highlight text or decorate while bullet journaling. So as far as color variety goes, the mildliner zebra pens are on top of the list. However, none of these have as large a range of mild colors as Zebra.

However, the mildliners are not the only pastel highlighters around: Stabilo has a very popular set, so does Bic, Faber-Castell, Pilot Frixion, Staedtler many less famous brands too. If you think the bright highlighter colors are overrated then these pens will bring nicer fresher tones to your collection. These are available in the same 15 original ink colors as the highlighters. Zebra has more recently also released the Mildliner brush pens. This allows you to not only highlight text but also underline and write notes with the fine tip. The Midliners are also dual tip pens they have a broad chisel tip on one end and a bullet fine tip on the other end of the pen. The Mildliner Japan brand innovated stationery with a range of highlighters that come in a variety of color tones to give you much more choice than the average bright and fluorescent highlighter colors that were available in the market.

When I first came across this brand I had never heard of the word mildliner. The mildliner highlighters from Zebra What is a Midliner pen?

Zebra mildliner markers