A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

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lester1027
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A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by lester1027 »

For now, after highlighting a region of text and selecting it, the text cannot be directly copied with crtl+c. I need to select the range larger than the highlighted text to do so, which can be a little bit inconvenient.

Is it possible that when we select the highlighted text, we can also directly copy it?

Thank you.
lester1027
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Re: A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by lester1027 »

Currently, if I use the 'copy' function after selected the highlighted text, the highlighting itself is copied and when I use the 'paste' function, one more highlighting layer is applied to the highlighted text.

I cannot think of a proper use case of this functionality yet.

Thank you.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hi, lester1027

This is simply because the "highlight" is itself a comment which can be selected so you can modify the properties. In order to ignore existing comments while using the "select text" tool, you should either enable "Exclusive mode" or hold the "Shift" key to temporarily toggle it on when selecting text that overlaps a comment.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
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David.P
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Re: A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by David.P »

Hello all,

I often find that I am unable to select text that is behind a highlight, even when holding the Shift key:
Exclusive Mode
Enable/Disable exclusive mode for the active tool. Hold Shift to enable Exclusive Mode temporarily.
https://help.pdf-xchange.com/pdfxt ... ts_ed.html
The problem occurs only sometimes. If I then switch to another tool, for example to the link creation tool, and back to the text selection tool, then the text behind the highlight can be selected by holding the Shift key.

So the "Hold Shift to enable Exclusive Mode" seems to have small bug.

Thanks very much for looking into this,

Best regards
David
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, David.P

Are you running the latest build at the moment? I ask because the select text tool now has a special handling for highlights specifically, you do not even need to hold shift, when clicking above a highlight, you can simply click and drag, you will see that the initial click does select the highlight, but as soon as the drag operation starts, the select text "kicks in":
PDFXEdit_QZupSUYSz8.gif
Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
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Arnold
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Re: A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by Arnold »

It works, but there is a short time lag between when I click on the highlight and when select text kicks in and I can click and drag. Is this by design or because of the slowness of my computer?

Thanks.
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Tracker Supp-Stefan
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Re: A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello Arnold,

I can not see any noticeable delay using that tool - so I suspect that this might be local to your machine.

Does this happen only with a specific (probably large) file, or with any you try on?
Do you have another machine on which you can do a comparison test?

Kind regards,
Stefan
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David.P
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Re: A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by David.P »

David.P wrote: Tue Oct 10, 2023 5:43 pm I often find that I am unable to select text that is behind a highlight, even when holding the Shift key:
TrackerSupp-Daniel wrote: Tue Oct 10, 2023 9:11 pm Are you running the latest build at the moment? I ask because the select text tool now has a special handling for highlights specifically, you do not even need to hold shift, when clicking above a highlight, you can simply click and drag, you will see that the initial click does select the highlight, but as soon as the drag operation starts, the select text "kicks in":
Indeed, Daniel, this is a nicely refined feature and works very good.

Something else I often do is to select text directly with the hand tool without having to switch to the text selection tool first. All you need to do in this case is hover over the text with the hand tool, and the hand tool changes to the text selection tool.

It would be great if the hand tool would also do this if the text in question has a highlight to it. If this feature should turn out to be too fragile, it could be limited to when the Shift key is held down.

In other words, holding down the Shift key would make it very easy to select text with highlights even if the current tool is the hand tool. The way it is now, you have to switch to the text selection tool to be able to select text under highlights.

On a second note, if text has, in addition to a highlight, a hyperlink assigned to it, it may be difficult to select either the text or the highlight.

This issue is also related to the changed, now rectangular design of the highlights. See the attached PDF, where you can try it for yourself.

As this also affects the following discussion, I have linked to here from over there.

Foxit style highlighters

I hope that all this helps to further refine and optimize tools and methods for selecting text and comment objects.

Best regards
David

image.png
Text Selection with Highlights and Links.pdf
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David.P
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: A Small Suggestion about Highlighting and Copying

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, David.P

To be quite honest, I am unsure why simply holding Shift does not already allow the hand tool to properly switch to the select text tool (when that option is enabled) over top of comments like this. It works perfectly fine when there is only base content in place as you are holding shift.
I will pass that along to the dev team, as it should definitely be consistent. Likewise, Hyperlinks should get the same treatment with regards to exclusive mode toggling specifically, I am afraid that due to their nature as an intentionally clickable object, it is far less likely we will see a change in their base handling to allow text selection without exclusive mode toggling, in that particular case, but I will push for it.

Regarding selection of overlapping objects, if this were base content it would be the "alt" modifier you are looking for, this allows you to cycle through selectable objects which are in the same location. I am making a ticket to have this added to the Commenting tools as well. It should help greatly if it gets implemented.

The two tickets I have made are as follows:
RT#6689: FR: Add "alt-object-cycle selection" to commenting tools.
RT#6690: Bug: Hand tool "exclusive + switch to select text" fails above comments


Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
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Support@pdf-xchange.com
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