As a serial screenshot translator I can attest the situation is worse than this. Many apps actively prevent you taking screenshots making translation literally impossible. Or they’ll send “nojs just took a screenshot!” to maximally creep the other party out. All because you can’t select the damn text
Just let me select text
581–590 of 621 posts
Re: Just let me select text
#582My partner and I were just talking about this yesterday. It's so infuriating I can't even select my order number out of a text on my Samsung phone anymore without copying the whole message and getting the code out of that. Or on reddit you can't copy text or copy a link or even see what a link is before you click it. It's insane.
Re: Just let me select text
#583Good luck to em ... as they say in their notes:
"We do not want to restrict DHH's freedom of speech, he can write and say what he likes. However, free speech is not "freedom from the consequences of that speech", and we as a community are completely free not to associate with people who hold views we find abhorrent."
I get it. Basically, "I don't want to associate with assholes". That's not unreasonable.
Re: Just let me select text
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can pretty much guarantee that an app like Bumble is not a webview wrapper.
You can never know nowadays. But yeah, it must be a native app, at least on iOS with its PWA-hostile policies.
You can know. There is always telltale jank in web apps. And there are things that are basically impossible to do in web apps, like reliable camera integration.
Re: Just let me select text
#585One of many examples of the way that UI has backslid in modern times. I swear, sometimes I think we peaked sometime in the TN3270 days
Did the old GUI frameworks allow selecting text though? I had another commenter explain that selectable text is a totally different type of widget than a regular non-selectable text, and a much more involved/heavyweight too!
well, not really a gui framework, terminals were text based so it's up to the term/emulator
Re: Just let me select text
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being unable to select text out of a link is absolutely infuriating when you want to just copy a piece of it, either because it's a reference number or something, or you want to translate it. Mobile is nearly impossible, and desktop is also fiddly in many cases. Often when translating it's easier to just OCR the area with the dictionary app, which is madness when it started as text.
At least in Firefox, holding down alt while selecting let's you do it within a link without triggering a click event.
TIL. Thank you!
Now I just have to remember this next time I need to select text within a link. :)
Re: Just let me select text
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copy-paste obviously makes things easier, but it should be noted that many translate tools let you draw characters these days, and many OCR services can read Chinese characters. But I agree that those are annoying extra steps.
Not to be argumentative, but the chance of my correctly drawing "下单" and "返回" - especially using my finger on a phone screen - rounds to 0.
It's definitely not the easiest thing, but I imagine that someone working with Chinese characters often would have learned enough about radicals and stroke order to do it in a pinch. The hardest part is memorizing the characters; the OCR in, say, Google Translate, is quite good at picking out what you meant.
Re: Just let me select text
#588I have a habit of selecting and highlighting text on computer screens, while reading. I have no issues tracking lines usually, but somehow I still select and highlight. Maybe it is just easier to track lines this way. When I see some web page, that prevents this, then that website gets a -50 reputation score out of 100 in my book. So if the site is perfect in every other way (almost no site is) then -50 still makes i…
It's most satisfying when the text selection has a nice color, that fits the theme of the site, instead of the boring default blue.
Web devs, please make use of
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/::selection
Re: Just let me select text
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
On iOS you can create a shortcut to push a screenshot through the built in OCR and copy to clipboard. You need to crop beforehand if you don’t want all the text on the screen. https://imgur.com/a/NctIGsK
On recent iOS versions it just happens. You try to click on an image in the browser to save it and whoops! you're clicking on text in the image that iOS already OCRed for you. And the Photos app will let you search for OCRed text, and it OCRs _all_ the text without you having to lift a finger.
It’s 50/50 if the screenshot thumbnail screen shows for me these days. The action works 100% of the time.
Re: Just let me select text
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just about translations, either. Sometimes you want to document or describe to someone where something is on a site. "Click on FooBar, then in the popup saying > check the > checkbox and click OK. It's much less frustrating when you can copy-paste the damned labels straight off the site/app, than retyping them and hoping you didn't misspell FooBar as FooBaz, leading the other person into deeper trouble rathe…
I actually opened the browser's Developer Tools and used the Elements panel to copy text from the button elements. Many times.
So did I.
And since I don't do webdev for a living, most of my quite frequent use of Developer Tools is to work around this kind of nonsense - non-copyable text, obscured text, layout breakage, etc. Second biggest use case is to unbreak web forms that fail silently or for bogus reasons. This happens surprisingly often.