HOW TO: Control Text Selection Behaviour

[jim_chapman]

You can select text in Freda by long-tapping/right clicking, and then dragging the selection handles.

If you want to make it easier to select text, you can change the behaviour of the drag gesture so that, instead of moving the page, it will select text; that is the 'swipe action' option at the top of the controls page.

Freda's normal action on selected text, when the text is tapped, is to pop up a menu, offering various options - highlight, bookmark, find, copy, etc.  If you want Freda to always perform the same action, you can make this happen by using the controls ribbon that pops up at the top of the screen, when ... is tapped.  The right-most item on the controls ribbon shows what Freda does with selected text - tap that item, and you can change its behaviour.

In this video, you can see how to do this, and set Freda up so that every time you select a piece of text, a window will pop up, showing that text translated into German.

[Tdublyou]

Trying to copy text to clipboard. Looks like the new text selection function, with the handles at each end of the selected text, only lets you select one word, even though it appears that more words were selected. At least this is what happens when you try to copy a phrase.

[jim_chapman]

Trying to copy text to clipboard. Looks like the new text selection function, with the handles at each end of the selected text, only lets you select one word, even though it appears that more words were selected. At least this is what happens when you try to copy a phrase.

Thank you for reporting the problem.  Can you explain precisely what you're doing, because the program is obviously misunderstanding your selection gesture.  I manage to copy a phrase OK by doing:
1) Long-tap (or right click) on a word.  The word is selected.
2) Drag selection handle to extend the selection over more text.
3) Tap (or left-click) on selected text or selection handle. A menu pops up.
4) On the menu, choose 'Copy'.  All the text is copied.

Presumably you are using some different (but entirely reasonable) gesture to select and copy text, and Freda is not understanding you.  Please let me know how I need to change the program.

[Tdublyou]

Now, following your instruction, long tapping a word, then tapping on the selection to get the menu, then selecting Copy, results in whatever was in the clipboard being erased, and nothing taking its place (i.e., no ability to Paste, option is greyed out, along with my clipboard app Clipmate now indicating that the Windows clipboard is empty.) i use a MS Surface Pro 4, just the tablet, relying on touchscreen gestures, latest version of Windows 10. It used to work in this environment before your program revision.

[jim_chapman]

I have made changes to the 'copy' code to address this problem - now it will copy text in response to either a long-tap or a short-tap.  That basically reverts it to the behaviour before the last update, so hopefully that will work for you.  These changes will come in the next update (I expect this will be within 1-2 weeks).

[RustyBrownlow]

In this video, you can see how to do this, and set Freda up so that every time you select a piece of text, a window will pop up, showing that text translated into German.

Thank you for the video! I changed the swipe default to 'menu' and it is so very useful.

[Hussain Noyon]

If you want to make it easier to select text, you can change the behaviour of the drag gesture so that, instead of moving the page, it will select text; that is the 'swipe action' option at the top of the controls page.

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Great! Thank you so much. It helps a lot.