making it possible to highlight text with different colors (not only yellow)
Amr El-Hadidy
shared this idea
Hey everyone, we’ve added a comment below explaining the situation with this feature in more detail, to give you all a better understanding of why this is a non-trivial change. We’ve changed the status to “Planned” now that we have some actual movement towards it, as outlined below.
Appreciate your patience, especially with such sparse updates from our end. Apologies for that.
119 comments
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HM Friesen
commented
I look forward to the day this feature is available!!! On paper I use 6 different colours to indicate different types of information (background info, important methods, analytical results, etc.).
If you could, make the colours typical highlighter colours (yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, blue) but so vibrant as to be distracting.
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Alan Williams
commented
Totally agree… I need this function desperately……to track different theses. Colour palette/rose please…that we can (if needed ) also categorise, for use of same colour code across multiple documents.
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Dallas
commented
If have just been asking the same question. The program is great but different colours for both the highlight option and notes would help in the organisation of my work.
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Rustle Crowe
commented
Great thing, I would appreciate a lot seeing this feature in the near future. And with these things already underway, you might be able to implement the great "note overview" proposal someone made with this idea:
http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-general/suggestions/3642267-multicolor-notes-with-sorting-option-and-general -
Thomas Christensen
commented
Looking forward to it - happy to see you are working on it!
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Reta
commented
Cheers!!! Thank you!!
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Jurgen Van de Walle
commented
Well, as often happens with this things, they seem like obvious but they clearly are not - as they are embedded deep down in the code. Still happy Mendeley is working on this!
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AdminMendeley
(Admin, Mendeley)
commented
To explain why this isn't as simple as people think: In private groups, all members of a group can annotate and highlight the same document, and see each others highlights. At some point in the past, a choice was made to differentiate the highlights of each user by showing them in different colours. The APIs we use for the desktop were then built around this, locking us into this system, and creating legacy issues if we were to significantly change them.
So what do we need to do to fix this?
Firstly, we are building annotations and highlights into our public API so that 3rd parties, as well as our own mobile apps, will be able to read and create annotations as well. We've built this so that each annotation can be associated a colour and a user separately.
Then we need to redevelop how we identify annotations by other users. Something like a small name attached to the highlight, a slightly different graphical style, or possibly avatar images are all options.
Then we need to build the actual tools for changing colours. This sounds like the easy bit, but desktop developers are unfortunately a scarce resource at Mendeley.
In terms of actual use cases, we know that people use colours for differentiating between meanings of highlights, which are usually personal and specific user to user. As we care about crowdsourcing and semantic data, we would love to figure out a way to capture that meaning in a way that can be re-used and benefit other readers in more tangible ways. The possibilities for us to create tools like this is why we use our own annotations framework instead of using the native PDF formatted annotations (though there are many other reasons as well).
I hope this clarifies things. We hear you, it's something we're working towards, and we appreciate your patience.
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Leonardo Barbosa
commented
this is so simple... I don't understand why not to implement even though you are working in exciting new features. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to use the tool.
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Daniel Casas
commented
It is an excellent idea!!!
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vaaaaal
commented
I agree with many of the comments below that this should be changed to a high priority future feature.
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Iris
commented
It's an awesome program that helps people go eco. But it's not perfect without the multiple choice of hightlighting colors for sure!!!
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David Kane
commented
I'd really like the ability to highlight with different colours.
--- Mendeley is awesome, good work!
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Anonymous
commented
I agree with this - both notes and the highlighter colour could be improved by having multiple colours to choose from.
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Anonymous
commented
it would also be really useful to have a window / tool bar box where you could establish a key for different colors. not 100% unnecessary but i think it would make the tool much more powerful than just adding extra colors
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Julian House
commented
Although I would be happy with simply an option to use multiple colors while highlighting, to make this feature additionally useful, I would like to suggest that users be able to search for what they have highlighted in each of the different colors. This would make this feature incredibly useful for all documents, but especially those that do not have text-recognition. By highlighting passages in pdf files that do not have text recognition, I could still search those documents relatively efficiently after I have read them.
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DC
commented
please to it asap
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Reta
commented
It'll be very useful if multiple-color be introduced in the next version!! Please increase the priority...T-T
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Anonymous
commented
There is already selection menu (choice between highlight text and highlight rectangle) it can just be expanded by color option.
It is not as complex as other great and innovative yet not as useful features you introduce! -
Pedro Damas
commented
I would just be one more people complaining about this, which in fact is much more important for research than most of the stuff you are able to do with Mendeley...
AND I do not think it demands much investment or effort from programmers... =S
