Simple Wish: To Select\Copy the text of Search Results
The Print\Export feature is powerful, I grant you that, but sometimes it's too powerful for this simple task - to select\copy a portion of search results to the clipboard.
For example, I found an obscure verse a friend was searching for, and simply wanted to copy and paste it directly into an email. No can do. Instead, I either have to then click on the reference to bring up a Bible resource, or go via Print\Export/
Not a great hardship, but it's just those little streamlinings which Logos is often so good at providing that make it a joy to use - it makes the lack of simple things like this more irritating and hard to justify.
More annoyingly, when right clicking and copying via the reference in Search Results, it is the reference that is copied, not the text.
I don't understand why the contents of certain tools are not selectable - can someone from Logos maybe enlighten us? Maybe Is it down to the way this feature has been implemented, and what looks like a simple feature add is actually complicated? Or is it simple to implement, but felt to be unnecessary for some reason?
I hope this will appear at some point.
Cheers
Richard
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Ah Richard ... you are so observant. I often wonder what the Logos staff does, since rumor has it they use the product too.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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I believe they've explained in the past why it would be hard to do. I think it's because they don't keep around in memory the info that gets written to the screen for the search results. They just write it to the screen and that that. So it's static graphic images to them, not live content. That seems to me a major design flaw, but it's how they decided to do it long ago and that would be a huge undertaking to redesign. I think they could at least offer screen selection and OCR capability to select stuff from anywhere in the Logos app. But they'd have to write a whole OCR module then, which I'm sure they'd be loathe to do since there are already other fine software products that do optical character recognition and it's not really their core business to do such. We can still hope. Someday maybe.
In the meantime, when I need to copy a snippet of something from the screen within Logos, I use ABBYY Screenshot Reader. Select a rectangle of text and it grabs the screenshot from that rectangle, does OCR transformation on the image, and copies the resulting text to the clipboard for me. I use it nearly every day and it's well worth the $10 I paid for it. It costs more now ($29.99), but I think it's still one of the best and most useful utility programs you could buy for about that much. So many uses. Say an error message comes up on your screen in Windows and you want to Google it to see what it means. Don't type it in manually; grab it from the screen and paste it into Google. Or some website has a great quote on it that you'd like to copy and paste into your FB status, but it turns out it's an image, not selectable text. No problem with this little useful program.
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Having been a software developer for many years and having worked with data flows etc, I'm not sure it would require such a huge redesign, unless the final window text was to be editable, but there are other approaches.
Clearly, the search results must exist as text somewhere along the data pipeline from search query to result display in order to generate the bitmapped search results. The text could be held in a buffer as long as the search results exist in a pane. A "copy" function could then access the text buffer to retrieve the text to copy, perhaps offering a "copy this item" and "copy all" function.
It's not full select and copy but it would be better than nothing?
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Richard Lyall said:
Having been a software developer for many years and having worked with data flows etc, I'm not sure it would require such a huge redesign, unless the final window text was to be editable, but there are other approaches.
Clearly, the search results must exist as text somewhere along the data pipeline from search query to result display in order to generate the bitmapped search results. The text could be held in a buffer as long as the search results exist in a pane. A "copy" function could then access the text buffer to retrieve the text to copy, perhaps offering a "copy this item" and "copy all" function.
It's not full select and copy but it would be better than nothing?
Bob talks more about this issue here: http://community.logos.com/forums/t/46104.aspx
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tom collinge said:Richard Lyall said:
Having been a software developer for many years and having worked with data flows etc, I'm not sure it would require such a huge redesign, unless the final window text was to be editable, but there are other approaches.
Clearly, the search results must exist as text somewhere along the data pipeline from search query to result display in order to generate the bitmapped search results. The text could be held in a buffer as long as the search results exist in a pane. A "copy" function could then access the text buffer to retrieve the text to copy, perhaps offering a "copy this item" and "copy all" function.
It's not full select and copy but it would be better than nothing?
Bob talks more about this issue here: http://community.logos.com/forums/t/46104.aspx
More specifically, the post where he talks about it in that thread is here: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/46104/346381.aspx#346381
Bob Pritchett said:This was an unintended side-effect of using HTML for report display in Logos 3. In Logos 4 we don't use HTML, and would have to write an entire text-selection framework for our report windows. This is a massive project, and in light of Microsoft (and Apple's) changing priorities, we're actually considering a return to HTML for report windows in the next version of Logos. So it seems like a bad investment of time to write the selection framework now for a display technology we may leave. If there are key things that need copying a lot, it would be much easier to make a "right-click and copy" UI for these specific things that worked on a whole paragraph/unit level, rather than implementing character level selection on what is essentially a "painted" window. If someone wants to provide a list of "top places I need 'copy'" we can add this soon.
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My PDF reader does essentially the same thing ... even when the PDF is an image it ocr's the text and places it behind the image so that the image can be highlighted and directly copied etc. Software developers are so inventive.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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