Highlighting with the same color/option

Rev. Mark C Spellman said:

 Often when highlighting I choose one highlighter - let's say 'yellow highlighter - highlighter pens' and will use that type of highlighter for a while. 

Is there any way to continue using a chosen highlighter without the selection window popping up every time. 

You can assign a hotkey to a highlighter.

I often use the yellow highlighter and square brackets, so I assigned hotkeys to them. Now, whenever I want to highlight yellow, I click and drag the cursor across the text, then press Y and it becomes highlighted with yellow.

Do set this up, choose Tools > Highlighting.

Scroll down to the highlighter you want. You will see a blue circle with a triangle.

Click the triangle to see choices.

Click the "down" triangle for the shortcut key and select the key you want.

I don't know enough about touch APIs on iOS or Android, but I can think of a nice and intuitive way to do this if it were supported.

• Select text.
• Tap on "Highlight", but instead of releasing, drag downward.
• On dragging down, a menu of the last 5 highlighters could be shown.
• Selection follows your finger across the menu items.
• Upon releasing, the highlighter under your finger is selected.

Otherwise, taping on "Highlight" (and releasing on "Highlight"), behaves as it does now.

Just not sure how easy that is to implement. Basically a drag-n-drop, but with a menu popping up in the correct place to receive the "drop", making the selection.

Is that possible?

(Note: I'm much more familiar with the way the Android app currently behaves than the iOS app, so I may be way off.)

alabama24 said:

There is another problem with this method, however. The note file structure makes large note files difficult to deal with. This can cause highlight delays of a minute or more… Highlights aren't the simple things they are on Kindle… so creating a "kindle like" solution might not be a good idea

The ideal situation is as was suggested above. The highlight box could offer as the top choice in the box the last used highlight style and document. Then offer the custom solutions below that. Wouldn't add much to the highlight popup and makes an easy highlight quick and simple. Then when I change the kind of content I'm highlighting I can chance the highlight style and document.

I"m guessing most people use one highlight the same way most of the time as they read a book.

Here's another, more sane, stab at this. Forgive the crudity of the image below; it's a two-minute hack job from <fluidui.com>.

It's still not as simple as the highlight only mode where every selection is a highlight, but it would allow one-click access to (most used or user-selected) pen highlighters. It also offers the benefit of removing a lot of clutter from the popup selection menu which is getting very crowded on smaller devices. All the basic note & highlighting commands are transferred to an overlay menu bar at the top (Add Note, Pen1...PenN, Clear Highlights, More Highlighting Options). And the selection menu gets more room to add more cool features.