Highlighting text in reader

[jamesquek]

Hello Mike,

Is there still no way to highlight text in the reader or am I missing something?

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

You mean for annotations? No, still in the works though.

 

[jamesquek]

No, I meant just highlighting it to flag new words. Perhaps, instead of highlighting, it can toggle among three states: highlight, normal and blankout like in a cloze deletion. This is to help us do self testing in the actual context of the written text.

 

[mikelove]

But you'd be selecting a piece of text and then having it display with some sort of color or marker on it? That's part of the feature I'm thinking of - annotations themselves are actually trivial once you've got that part down.

 

[jamesquek]

So blankouts could be one of the options? That would be cool!

 

[mikelove]

Yes, just a matter of getting our text segmentation algorithm to a point we're happy enough with that we can do that automatically.

 

[Alexis]

In terms of annotations, one thing I'd really love is "one swipe" highlighting, like in iBooks. I've always had to come back to ebooks, becase in every other ebook reader I've tried, highlighting is very cumbersome (you have to first select the text, then choose highlight from the popup. Quite 麻烦 if too have the extra clicks if you're highlighting a lot.

 

[mikelove]

I think we would implement selection within our existing system, so you can pick a single word by tapping on it or drag handles to pick more words - wouldn't really work to have two overlapping text selection systems here.

 

[Alexis]

I didn't mean to suggest changing Pleco reader's current single-tap, long-press functionality, or text selection.

I was more hoping to see a short-press-swipe, to do highlighting, for epubs, like iBooks currently does.

 

[mikelove]

Right, but I don't see a way for us to support that separate gesture without it interfering with our other gestures, so in our case we'd probably have you do a regular tap to select text, drag your handles around your desired highlight range, then tap on a newly added toolbar button to highlight it.