Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poll: Do you select text while reading?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 366 posts

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#351

Post by davimack »

OriginalSyn wrote: post #79
sk5t wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These terrible, tacky tack-ons have little to no relationship to what the developers would do... unless those same developers are also in charge of partner programs.

Exactly, I can't count the times I've butted heads with our marketing, design and business development teams over silly, annoying and outright ridiculous features they had charged us with implementing... before we became a more agile shop these confrontations usually resulted in me having to back down and implement the features because they were pretty much set in stone by the time they got into our queue but now we…

I wouldn't attribute the change to "agile" ... but would attribute the problem to poor design. Subtle difference, but you get the same garbage in agile stuff - just depends on the PM, really.

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#352

Post by davimack »

1) When scrolling is erratic (due to the mouse, the browser, or what have you) and reading a long article, I highlight a word in the last-read paragraph to allow me to scroll that paragraph up and not lose it.

2) When pages have low contrast, but I don't want to say View / Style / No Style (alt+v, y, n - in firefox), I'll select the whole page.

3) When pages have extra-wide text lines without sufficient spacing between lines (i.e., they do not conform to typographical rules for reading ... for example, Hacker News comments), I'll select individual lines in order to better follow the length of the line.

4) When interrupted in reading a lengthy article, so as not to lose my place, I'll double-click (middle wheel button is keyed to double-click) my reading position to highlight just that word.

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#353

Post by SquareWheel »

Inufu wrote: post #305
SquareWheel wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also do that. Once in a while you get text with a colon in it, which Chrome interprets as a protocol handler and goes to about:blank. 1 in a thousand but it still gets me often. Here is a test. drag: thistext And yes, I've reported this bug.

works fine for me in Chrome 23.0.1271.64 on Ubuntu 12.10

I believe it's Windows only, but I'm not currently dualbooting to verify.

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#354

Post by OriginalSyn »

davimack wrote: post #351
OriginalSyn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I can't count the times I've butted heads with our marketing, design and business development teams over silly, annoying and outright ridiculous features they had charged us with implementing... before we became a more agile shop these confrontations usually resulted in me having to back down and implement the features because they were pretty much set in stone by the time they got into our queue but now we…

I wouldn't attribute the change to "agile" ... but would attribute the problem to poor design. Subtle difference, but you get the same garbage in agile stuff - just depends on the PM, really.

No, I don't attribute it to being agile, I attribute it to dev being involved near the start of project planning and having input along the way. It just happened that when the company decided on being an agile shop this happened as well. Sorry that was not clear.

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#355

Post by godDLL »

dustmop wrote: post #59

I 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.

I only scroll to read very dense text, like technical docs - and those tend to have the kind of paragraphs that take pages to scroll past.

On the other hand I most often select text at the bottom of the page before hitting Space to advance the page. If you could place a line of highlight across the page before it starts spinning (or jumps) and fade it out gently after - that would definitely be of use.

Or you could think about splitting chubby paragraphs into predictably behaving chunks.

Very nice plugin, thank you.

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#356

Post by peterwhitesell »

ollysb wrote: post #299
aero142 wrote: post #51

When people see that I highlight text while I'm reading, they always want to know what practical reason it serves. The simplest answer is that it kind of helps me track the text, but it's less than that. It also isn't quite just a nervous habit. The only description that makes sense to me is that it feels like a physical connection to the page. More like spinning a pen, or rolling an object in your hand while you thi…

I'm curious to know if you use a mouse or trackpad. I get the same connection with the page by twitching the page with two finger scrolling on my trackpad.

I mostly use a trackpad. I interact with what I'm reading by two finger scrolling and tap-tap-drag highlighting.

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#357

Post by peterwhitesell »

proksoup wrote: post #197
aero142 wrote: post #51

When people see that I highlight text while I'm reading, they always want to know what practical reason it serves. The simplest answer is that it kind of helps me track the text, but it's less than that. It also isn't quite just a nervous habit. The only description that makes sense to me is that it feels like a physical connection to the page. More like spinning a pen, or rolling an object in your hand while you thi…

It's subconscience speed reading that we all learned naturally. If you look up the techniques around speed reading, it's basically what we're doing out of "nervous habit".

I've been doing this for about a year and a half now. I noticed my reading speed increased drastically along with this habit. I haven't done any actual measurements, but the speed difference is especially noticeable when I read from paper, or images of text.

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#359

Post by peterwhitesell »

seubert wrote: post #108
experiment0 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is definitely what I do too. I also tend to repeatedly tap the paragraph on the trackpad, so that fits well with your nervous habit analogy.

Yep, same. Sites that do things like auto-search highlighted words drive me nuts because of it.

Those sites bug me too, as a heavy user of highlighting. It also causes me problems reading editable text, for instance in a text editor. Sometimes I'll accidentally click and drag a selection to a different part of the text without noticing. I usually notice, but if I don't it can cause problems later, especially with text that is code, where it can cause mysterious bugs to show up.

Re: Poll: Do you select text while reading?

#360

Post by peterwhitesell »

Flenser wrote: post #314
bradleyland wrote: post #177

I answered yes to the first three, because I find myself doing it for a variety of reasons at different times. The most common reason is to keep track of my place when someone calls me or walks in to my office. The next most common reason is related to the first reason, and it's a shame that I have to do so. When you use text highlighting to track your reading (line by line), it's a sign that the site you're reading…

When the typography is really bad I use readability, although I'm sure I select text on readability too.

After a few days of use, I customized my readability (actually I use clearly now. http://evernote.com/clearly/) style to make highlighted text easier to read. After I moved to a theme with dark background and light text, the contrast between selection text and selection background was annoyingly low.
Post reply on HN