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Just let me select text

aartaka.me

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Re: Just let me select text

#601

Post by gwern »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #260

I 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…

One of the most surprising Gwern.net bug reports was from a compulsive highlighter who noted that the skip-ink implementation (which uses the old text-shadow trick, because frustratingly, the recently standardized skip-ink CSS still manages to fail at its only job and it looks awful) looked bad because of how browsers handle shadows and highlighting.

We had known about that (and it can't be fixed because browsers don't let you control the highlighting), but we had never imagined it'd be a problem because you'd only see it briefly when once in a while copy-pasting some text for a quote - right? I mean, why else would anyone be highlighting text? You'd only highlight small bits of text you had already read, so if it looked bad in places, that was fine, surely.

(Narrator: "It was not fine.")

Just another instance of Hyrum's law, I guess...

We decided to WONTFIX that because we can't easily fix that without making it uglier for users who don't abuse highlighting and are reading normally, which is almost everyone else.

Re: Just let me select text

#602

Post by abustamam »

71bw wrote: post #600
abustamam wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless it's a banking app and it blocks permissions for screenshots and similar things. Yeah those can fuck all the way off. I'm lucky I have two phones so I can take a photo of my screen and use it for OCR or whatever, but it's ridiculous I have to do that. I understand that for security purposes they don't want to let you take a screenshot in case of a man in the middle or whatever, but let me risk it. Warn me or…

Exactly the reason I still use LSPosed with the disable_flag_secure module on my device.

Oh, that's neat. It seems like LSP is no longer maintained. I'll look for alternatives.

Re: Just let me select text

#603

Post by jowea »

mc3301 wrote: post #511
jowea wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember seeing at least one site where the result of copying is garbled text.

Music lyrics sites used to all do this. You'd copy/paste the lyrics, and every other line was the website name or something. Maybe because it was easy to scrape the text and make your own lyrics website or something? I also think that google's song lyrics (on the search page itself) used to be non-selectable. But I jsut tried it, and they are selectable now.

Oh the copy paste manipulation is still not that rare. I'm speaking of sites where even if open the HTML source you only get a text garble that is magically converted into readable but uncopiable text.

Re: Just let me select text

#604

Post by sigseg1v »

lomase wrote: post #490
tomaskafka wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double click selects text. What to do with web app elements where people double click or rapidly click?

Double click selects text. That is what it should do.

The user base of the application I develop is non-technical. Most of them double click or drag EVERYTHING. It ends up highlighting stuff that looks weird and now they are dragging and dropping things with a quarter of the screen highlighted in a different color and it just looks messy and obscures data behind the text on pages with visual diagrams.

A designer pointed this out and requested we disable highlighting on button text and draggable handles, and honestly it's a good idea and those problems are now fixed. The downside is that someone can no longer highlight the text on the draggable button that says "Instruction Node" and that's a totally fine tradeoff.

This seems fine to me. For example in inkscape if I drag on the File menu at the top (or double click), I can't start highlighting the "Fi" in the "File" menu label and I'm totally fine with that, same thing here.

Re: Just let me select text

#605

Post by gumboshoes »

I use EasyDict, an open source translation desktop app, and OwlOCR, a paid one. Both let me hit a keyboard command and snap any text to instantly OCR it and translate it. Or just grab it as text. Often supposedly selectable text isn't or grabs too much automatically so this is faster and more accurate.

https://github.com/tisfeng/Easydict

Re: Just let me select text

#606

Post by Andi »

This is how I solve this problem on my Samsung Galaxy S22: make a screenshot, then you are able to select text in the builtin Gallery app via instant OCR. Works surprisingly well. I needed some time to find this feature out.

Re: Just let me select text

#607

Post by pbasista »

bonoboTP wrote: post #495
pbasista wrote: post #379

When I encounter a website which does not allow text selection, copying or right click, I usually enable the "Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy" browser extension which removes all of these restrictions. Such restrictive practices, in my opinion, not only make the website less useful to the user. It also intentionally alienates its users. I cannot think of a rational reason to do something like that.

> It also intentionally alienates its users. Only the tinkerer-type techies. Most people don't understand why right click doesn't work, they don't have a mental model of what is responsible for what and things are often broken in mysterious ways anyway. If users are not alienated by how the web looks without an adblocker (try it once on some mainstream news site or blog or recipe site!), they surely won't be alienate…

> The rational reason is to avoid getting their content "stolen"

Rational? From what point of view?

What is "rational" about thinking that the content of a website should not be copied?

> having the user leave the site to do something else with the saved content.

And what is controversial about user leaving a website on their own terms, i.e. when they want?

Re: Just let me select text

#608

Post by 71bw »

abustamam wrote: post #602
71bw wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the reason I still use LSPosed with the disable_flag_secure module on my device.

Oh, that's neat. It seems like LSP is no longer maintained. I'll look for alternatives.

https://github.com/JingMatrix/LSPosed

OR, if you want to partake in shady shenanigans, there's always the official LSPosed internal testing. Forgive me for this Telegram link but it's the best option to share this: https://t.me/RootDetected/138/510

Re: Just let me select text

#609

Post by int_19h »

lomase wrote: post #490
tomaskafka wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double click selects text. What to do with web app elements where people double click or rapidly click?

Double click selects text. That is what it should do.

Except when double click means "open", which it does in basically all the desktop OSes with default settings.

Re: Just let me select text

#610

Post by int_19h »

lomase wrote: post #491
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always bothered me that links on webpages are single click to open. They should require double clicking to open (like just about everything else on a computer) and single click should be used to start selecting text, like everywhere else on a computer.

They should require double clicking to open (like just about everything else on a computer) That is some Windows UI stuff, If I recall correctly in OSX you don't double click as much.

It's exactly the same in macOS - you single click in Finder to select and double click to open. Indeed, macOS is where this whole setup originated.
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