To me, highlighting is not a
learning tool, but a tool to ensure that great passages I encounter while reading books, do not fall into the realm of the forgotten.
(I sometimes also highlight passages that are particularly badly written, but focus on the
good things in a ratio of 99:1.) I'm running an online quotations project at
www.aboq.org, still in its initial stages after many years. (I lack the programming expertise to customize the MediaWiki software to fit the project's needs, so I'll need to hire programmers to do that for me, if I can get the necessary funding to hire the programmers.)
So, the passages I highlight in Marvin (and GoodReader) are later transferred to
www.aboq.org. However, the project is conceived so that
anyone from around the world could publish their favourite passages there, not just myself. Here are a couple of examples of what a quotations/highlights page might look like:
- The Thirteen Problems (1933) by Agatha Christie (to me, hands-down the best Miss Marple volume)
- Двенадцать стулев, i. e. The Twelve Chairs (1928) by Ilya Ilf & Yevgeniy Petrov (much-loved, hilarious Russian classic)
*****
crashnburn, I'd forget about
underlining in Marvin, instead of or in addition to highlighting. It was tested in the Marvin Beta group, and wasn't working properly. Why? Because Marvin gives you
so much flexibility to customize line spacing in the books you read. It's easy enough to accomplish underlining for, say, GoodReader, which gives you no such flexibility (because PDF files, by nature, are rigid and inflexible).
The same applies to highlight colours. The only reason GoodReader gives you the full palette of colours for highlighting, is because it's totally inflexible in terms of customizing the
background of pages. It can only be white (or whatever
default the publisher specified), or shades of grey. In contrast, you can choose from literally
dozens of delightful background colours in Marvin, and textured backgrounds are coming up. Given that, the highlight colours must be sufficiently visible no matter what background colour/texture the user may have selected. I can, therefore, understand why Kris would limit the choice of available highlight colours to 5.
To me, 5 highlight colours seems just about right. For what it's worth, here is how I use the 5 highlight colours in Marvin (and I use similar colours for the same purposes in GoodReader):
- YELLOW highlight –> typo needs to be corrected here
- GREEN highlight –> formatting needs to be improved here
- PINK highlight –> favourite passage of mine
- BLUE highlight –> otherwise important or noteworthy passage
- PURPLE highlight –> general notes and comments on highlighted passage/book content