Highlights/annotations functionality + few suggestions

[bea7689]

Hello!

I have a few questions regarding highlights, annotations, and bookmarks. As I understand it, in Freda, it's possible to annotate, but that annotation is assigned as a bookmark. Highlights are purely visual and don't support notes. I don't quite understand why they are treated the way they are.

1. I often annotate multiple sections on a single page. Because annotations are treated as bookmarks, a bookmark icon appears to the left of each annotated section. It means that whenever I have more than three annotations on one page, it becomes close to unreadable because the icons clutter the text. If the selected text is in the middle of a paragraph, the word immediately before it also appears to be "annotated", and it's sometimes cofusing, especially when two adjacent sentences have different annotations.

Here are a few possible solutions, if you considered this as an issue: 
a. move the bookmark icon to the margin, alligned with the line of the annotated text;
b. remove the icon entirely, or make it a toggleable feature in the settings;
c. allow highlights to support attached notes.

2. When selecting text on a PC (I'm using the hold and drag feature, though that may not matter), would it be possible to enable the pop-up menu (highlight, bookmark, annotate, search, copy, etc.) to appear automatically, without the need to click on the text again? Most apps seem to work that way.

3. It would be lovely to be able to add/edit colours of highlights/bookmarks, since some of them look can look odd in certain ink and paper colour combinations. Speaking of which, it would be great if there was a preview option when editing the appearance of the app/presets.

4. Would it be possible to let users add and save a custom dictionary for the "search" function? It seems feasible to implement, as long as users can provide the URL pattern. E.g., Merriam-Webster, which is used in Freda, uses the path of "https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/WORD". Collins Dictionary uses "https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/WORD". If users could input a custom URL path, could Freda support additional sites to search, provided they follow formulaic structures?

I also have a few other suggestions. I understand that UI might not be the highest priority while Freda is still under development, but I thought they are worth mentioning anyway.

1. It would be nice to be able to upload a custom background image.

2. I know that's kinda what presets are for, but I read both on my PC and my phone, switching several times a day. I have set different margins and font sizes, etc. for each device using two separate presets. Would it be possible for Freda to remember which preset is assigned to which device? The moment sync happens, preset is synced as well, and I have to change it manually (admittedly, it takes five seconds to do so, but it would be more convenient).

3. Why is it only possible to sort by "recent" and "title" when using the grid layout? And when using the stack layout, would it be possible to reduce the size of the sorting headers (A, B, etc.)? Right now, each letter takes up as much space as a book entry, which feels a little like wasted space (especially on mobile). Would it be possible to add autofill option when using "filter" on the bookshelf?

4. Would it be possible to show reading progress on the bookshelf view? I think it would be a nice touch.

5. It's something I've seen in Koodo Reader - there's a feature which allows the user to view all highlights and annotations across books in one place. You can switch to a "highlights" or "notes" tab, where everything is displayed in a sortable grid, including the book it came from and the date it was created. Clicking on an entry takes you directly to the place in the book. Would it be possible to add something similar to Freda? As of now, the user is only able to view their bookmarks in the book they are currently reading (it would also be lovely to make the bookmark window a bit bigger, because any annotations made aren't readable and cut off after the first word).

6. In the book view, only the book opened last appears. It would be great to be able to cycle through all of the books. I know I can just right-click and choose "info", but then why have a separate "book" tab, if the tab itself won't ever be used that way, but the "info" button on the bookshelf instead?

Sorry for the long post, and thank you so much for developing Freda! I love Freda as it is, these are just little tweaks that would make me love it even more 

[jim_chapman]

Hi Bea, and thank you for taking the time to post with so many well-considered suggestions.

Here are some of my initial thoughts about the points you mention:
... annotation is assigned as a bookmark. Highlights are purely visual and don't support notes. I don't quite understand why they are treated the way they are. => You're right about how it works; as for why it's done that way, it's simply that people seemed to want a way of putting a purely visual mark on the page (a highlight) or a way of marking a spot that you can cross-reference to, jump to, and label (a bookmark - and in the case where you want to label it as well, an annotation).   So highlights are purely visual, whereas annotations (and bookmarks, which are just annotations with no text label) appear on the page, but also in the navigation UI, and in a dedicated table view.

A bookmark icon appears to the left of each annotated section. It means that whenever I have more than three annotations on one page, it becomes close to unreadable because the icons clutter the text. If the selected text is in the middle of a paragraph, the word immediately before it also appears to be "annotated", and it's sometimes cofusing, especially when two adjacent sentences have different annotations.  => Maybe the readability problem could be improved by using a dimmer colour for your bookmarks.  But I agree it is a difficulty if you use bookmarks a lot.

Here are a few possible solutions, if you considered this as an issue: 
a. move the bookmark icon to the margin, alligned with the line of the annotated text; => I'll think about that; it might work.
b. remove the icon entirely, or make it a toggleable feature in the settings; => I think I do want bookmarks to look different from highlights, because they are different things
c. allow highlights to support attached notes. => I already have troubles with users understanding (or not) the difference (that highlights are visual indications only, and bookmarks support navigation and note-taking).  I'm not sure I want to introduced a change that could create more confusion.
=> Another possibility is to show bookmarks (perhaps optionally) as coloured underline rather than a 'ribbon/flag' overlay.  I have been thinking about that too.

2. When selecting text on a PC (I'm using the hold and drag feature, though that may not matter), would it be possible to enable the pop-up menu (highlight, bookmark, annotate, search, copy, etc.) to appear automatically, without the need to click on the text again? Most apps seem to work that way.=> It's a fair thought.  It used to work the way you suggest, but I got feedback that (particularly on Android phones) people didn't want the menu always popping up.  It could be an optional setting (Freda already has plenty of those!)

3. It would be lovely to be able to add/edit colours of highlights/bookmarks, since some of them look can look odd in certain ink and paper colour combinations. Speaking of which, it would be great if there was a preview option when editing the appearance of the app/presets.  => Obviously you can change the colour of an individual highlight/bookmark just by tapping on it.  But I do see what you mean about colour combinations - and what would really be needed is a way to switch all bookmarks (or some defined group of them) to a different colour.  I did, a while ago, ponder the whole question of defining 'themes' for Freda - whereby not only paper/ink/link could be customised together, but you could also map CSS colours according to the theme, and define colour schemes for highlights and bookmarks that varied according to theme.  It is on my 'to do' list, but doing a proper job of  it would be a lot of work.
=> As for 'previewing' the effect of presets, doing this properly would be complicated - effectively I'd need to build a 'preview page' screen that duplicates all the rendering functions in the regular book page screen.  More feasible would be to simply provide a button to 'revert the last change that was made to settings'.  That's possible, but quite fiddly, mainly because the meaning of  'the last change' is a bit elusive (what about a change made because of a sync operation, or made because a new book was opened, that had a custom preset associated with it).  So at the moment it's on the 'to do' list.

4. Would it be possible to let users add and save a custom dictionary for the "search" function? It seems feasible to implement, as long as users can provide the URL pattern. E.g., Merriam-Webster, which is used in Freda, uses the path of "https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/WORD". Collins Dictionary uses "https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/WORD". If users could input a custom URL path, could Freda support additional sites to search, provided they follow formulaic structures?
=> This is already possible.  In the dictionary lookup screen, right-click (or hold) on the button with the dictionary name.  Then a vertical list of dictionaries will appear (Miriam Webster and Dictionary.com), and below that an editable text entry box containing a URL.  Update that to the URL you want to use, putting {0} in the spot where you want the word to appear.

I also have a few other suggestions. I understand that UI might not be the highest priority while Freda is still under development, but I thought they are worth mentioning anyway.

1. It would be nice to be able to upload a custom background image. => It turned out to be rather a problematic feature, so I removed it.  Firstly, it caused Freda to fail some Android security tests (ridiculous I know, but Google are a law unto themselves), and secondly it created a way for people to break the application - background images that are too big, too small, the wrong shape, or the wrong bitmap encoding could all cause difficulties.  And sometimes those difficulties were 'the app crashes on launch', making it hard for the user (or me) to fix the offending custom image.  Sorting this out properly is not impossible, but it's a knottier problem than you might think.

2. I know that's kinda what presets are for, but I read both on my PC and my phone, switching several times a day. I have set different margins and font sizes, etc. for each device using two separate presets. Would it be possible for Freda to remember which preset is assigned to which device? The moment sync happens, preset is synced as well, and I have to change it manually (admittedly, it takes five seconds to do so, but it would be more convenient).
=> Yes I have wondered what to do about this.  If you're syncing manually by exporting then importing an archive, you can do this easily enough, by just telling the 'import' operation not to import settings.  But automatic sync always fetches everything, settings included.  Making auto-sync customisable  is on my 'to do' list - but it involves a certain amount of UI coding and I haven't got round to it yet,

3. Why is it only possible to sort by "recent" and "title" when using the grid layout? And when using the stack layout, would it be possible to reduce the size of the sorting headers (A, B, etc.)? Right now, each letter takes up as much space as a book entry, which feels a little like wasted space (especially on mobile). Would it be possible to add autofill option when using "filter" on the bookshelf?
=> The restriction on 'sort/group by' options in the grid layout is because the other 'sort/group by' options need to have section headers, and in the grid layout there isn't an obvious place to put those headers.  I tried it, and the appearance was horrible. As for the size of the section headers, I do see what you mean, the only difficulty is that I have to make them large enough that they can reliably be tapped on, even on small mobile screens.  There is also a limitation (because of the programming environment I'm using) that items in the stack layout must all have the same height (or else you get horrible performance problems when there are a lot of items in the list).  'Performance Problems' are also the reason why the filter doesn't do autofill - on some devices with limited processing power, auto-fill makes the UI grind to a halt.  All these things are fixable, but they aren't a quick easy fix.

4. Would it be possible to show reading progress on the bookshelf view? I think it would be a nice touch. => I thought about it, but there are two possible solutions both of which would sometimes give the wrong answer.  I could (a) use the highest page number visited so far, or (b) use the most recent page number visited.  Choice (a) goes wrong because often the footnotes, index and appendices appear (as far the EPUB standard is concerned) at the end of the book - so as soon as you've visited a footnote it will look like you've nearly finished the book; choice (b) is problematic because if someone skips back in the book, it will look to them like they've "lost their progress", and I will get support requests about it.  Really the right thing is to keep track of the highest page number reached in the "main part of the book (not the index, appendices or footnotes)".  Unfortunately there isn't a standard way in EPUB files for telling which is the "main part" of a book.  So I could come up with some approximate solution that would mostly work, but there would be edge cases in which it would do something stupid and - because of the presence of footnotes, appendices etc. it would always tend to show 95% or something, when you'd actually finished reading the book.  What I really should implement, though, is a way to mark a book as 'finished reading' or 'shelved' or 'planning to read this one'.  The basic setup to support this is present already (you can do it using tags) I just need to define special tags to represent these things, and do some UI to make it easy to set these tags.

5. It's something I've seen in Koodo Reader - there's a feature which allows the user to view all highlights and annotations across books in one place. You can switch to a "highlights" or "notes" tab, where everything is displayed in a sortable grid, including the book it came from and the date it was created. Clicking on an entry takes you directly to the place in the book. Would it be possible to add something similar to Freda? As of now, the user is only able to view their bookmarks in the book they are currently reading (it would also be lovely to make the bookmark window a bit bigger, because any annotations made aren't readable and cut off after the first word). => Interesting.  I'll take a look at it.

6. In the book view, only the book opened last appears. It would be great to be able to cycle through all of the books. I know I can just right-click and choose "info", but then why have a separate "book" tab, if the tab itself won't ever be used that way, but the "info" button on the bookshelf instead? => Oddly enough, the main reason for that "book" tab is to make it easier for Freda to (when launched) re-open the last book you were reading, or to open directly from clicking a file, or download from a URL.  The reasons for this are a bit deep but not very interesting.  Cycling through the books would be a neat feature, though it would be complicated because there are different possible definitions of which book go to next in the cycle (do we sort by most recently opened, or by title ... or do we just use the currently selected sort/filter criteria?).  I will have a think about it.

Sorry for the long post, and thank you so much for developing Freda! I love Freda as it is, these are just little tweaks that would make me love it even more => Well, I'm grateful to you for taking the time to write with suggestions.  I will certainly be looking at implementing some of them.  Though I should tell you that nothing will happen quickly, as my available Freda-coding time is limited at the moment.  I'm getting my house rebuilt (while living it it) and this is taking up time and energy.  Have you seen the (movie) 'The Money Pit'?