Highlight Text feature like google play book

Question

I want my android application to have text highlighting within a WebView. Similar to the functionality found in Google play book. Does any one have an idea how to achieve this?

I'm using a WebView because my content is in html form.

basically talking about this effect:

enter image description here

while selecting. i am using web view now because my content is in html form. but cant achieve this on web view. any other option — Suhail Mehta, May 24 '13 at 09:57
@SuhailMehta : have you found any working approach on this ? I am looking for similar features to provide in my Textview or Webview which is going to display HTML . — kaushal trivedi, Dec 07 '15 at 14:11

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

The blue selection you see is part of the standard android environment when selecting text. So that should work on your standard webview without need of any custom code. => I'm no longer convinced this is true. Looks like it's not.

The green (yellow, orange, red, ...) selection however is custom.

You could read out the selected text from your selection event and use that information to update the html content, wrap the text in a span with a background color set.

Alternative approach is using javascript and enabling javascript in your webview. Not sure however how to get that done.

Some sources to check for that approach are https://github.com/btate/BTAndroidWebViewSelection and Android: How to select text from WebView, and highlight it onclick

Text selection from WebView details

To get the text selection working on a WebView you can use the following snippet (from this question). Trigger this on a button click (or other event) from your (context) menu.

private void emulateShiftHeld(WebView view)
    {
        try
        {
            KeyEvent shiftPressEvent = new KeyEvent(0, 0, KeyEvent.ACTION_DOWN,
                                                    KeyEvent.KEYCODE_SHIFT_LEFT, 0, 0);
            shiftPressEvent.dispatch(view);
            Toast.makeText(this, "select_text_now", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Log.e("dd", "Exception in emulateShiftHeld()", e);
        }
    }

I've updated the question with some more detail. Apparently it's not as default as I thought it was. Looks like even the selection needs some custom code. Example added to my original answer. — hcpl, May 24 '13 at 13:41

laalto · Answer 2 · 2013-05-24T10:43:50.107

0

Starting from API level 11, you can use TextView's textIsSelectable flag.

Edit: Even though the question has now been edited to specifically mention WebView, OP @Suhail's comment "my content is in html form" does not fully disqualify TextView as it can also render some basic HTML.

edited May 24 '13 at 10:43

answered May 24 '13 at 10:19

laalto

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how do you see this combined with the webview in this use case? – hcpl May 24 '13 at 10:32
@hcpl question does not specify context, e.g. `WebView` or `TextView` – laalto May 24 '13 at 10:34
indeed, I'll add a correction for that. It's only mentioned in the comments of the question that this is for a webview. – hcpl May 24 '13 at 10:38

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 08 '14 at 04:50

0

If your using WebView Try to integrate Mozilla PDF.JS where you can render PDF . which can contain Images also .

answered Jul 08 '14 at 04:50

Kantanand US

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Highlight Text feature like google play book

3 Answers3