No, I read the whole page top-down and press the "space" key to scroll down to the next page.
Poll: Do you select text while reading?
251–260 of 366 posts
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#252woah, this is fascinating to me. I've never heard of someone highlighting text while reading
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were on a MAC you would only have to make sure the mouse cursor is over the area you wanted to scroll. :P
I am actually using a MacBook Air, but I prefer keyboard to two-finger scrolling most of the time.
Air arrow keys are half the size of regular keys, which makes scrolling through keyboard even more painful for me. The button is like a single button, and you have to hit its top half or bottom half to scroll.
I had been using two finger scrolling since Lion. But most PC user that tries to scroll a page on my laptop, finds it very difficult.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#254I used to do this quite often when reading on a laptop with an external mouse, as an alternative to scrolling, so I could see where I was, especially on single page/printer friendly views.
Having an iPad and doing a lot of reading on Flipboard has "untrained" me, and I don't think I do it anymore on any platform.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#255Some HTML/CSS design decisions leave me selecting to read, if not just copying and pasting into a text editor.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#256> Yes, but for some other reason
It's a compulsive habit that I can't stop, it serves no practical reason whatsoever. I also bite my nails. Same problem.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#257I used to years ago, but eventually wrote a browser extension Paragrasp to do it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paragrasp/lhhabjbh... for Chrome and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paragrasp/ for Firefox.
Thanks! Paragrasp is just what I was looking for (but didn't know it). :)
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#258For long articles, or content I really want to digest, I copy the text into a text file in a directory in my home space (with original URL and under git control). When I get to it, I delete the lines I've read, or add notes to follow up with more research or comments. This is all under automated git commits, so I can track my reading backlog at any point in time, and can go back to an article 6 months ago that I may have "deleted" simply by searching my automated commits.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#259I don't do it all the time, but when I do it's usually to increase contrast, or to mark my place in long text that I'll need to come back to.
I also do it to find the mouse cursor. The text cursor is thin and not always easy to find amongst a large wall of text, so I'll click and start dragging and look to where the page is highlighted in order to find it.
Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?
#260When I read the title of this post I thought "WHOA, other people do that too?!" and clicked through to take the poll. Your poll is going to have a heavy selection bias towards people who select text while reading. People who don't select text while reading will probably ignore this poll and go read an article on erlang best practices or Paul Graham's favorite color.
I had originally posted a poll with Often/Sometimes/Never answers, but I realized, like you point out, that this poll would have heavy selection bias. So I changed the poll to gather reasons why people select. That's probably more interesting data than Yes/No anyways. :)
The ratio of people that does this is something that you could accurately measure if you have a somewhat popular website. (The reason why not so much, of course. I doubt many people have a conscious reason for this behaviour anyway. I don't.)