Quote:
Originally Posted by Faterson
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)
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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
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The answer to all the above is Good Data Schema Design. You need 'Data Packets & Actions' that will allow sharing of Quotes, Highlights.
Which means an all encompassing Schema for that is needed.
You are choosing background color variation over highlighting variation.
Why cannot those two be independent of each other? Yes, there may be cases of "clash / conflict".
But its like saying, in Microsoft Word I will
- DISALLOW WHITE FONTS because most people have white backgrounds
- DISALLOW Gray Fonts because some people might want to have GRAY backgrounds
This is a flawed design mindset.
Now, since your concern is 'region of conflict' - Background | Highlight | Text.
- As the independent user of the Reader App, i'd like freedom of all the above three :P
- Now when it comes to collaborative sharing - When we import / export and share highlights / underlines, we can choose ELEMENTS & ATTRIBUTES to apply or deny.
In your case the 5 colors work for you. I have a different kind of TAGGING thing in my mind.
Most people will have VARYING Color > Meaning (Key > Value Pair) tagging in their minds, depending on person and maybe area / motivation for varied tagging.
Giving people the flexibility to follow the mental tagging they would like is GOOD DESIGN fundamental.
And trust me, limiting TAGS and MEANINGS in any system is what becomes a design constraint for ENRICHMENT of that data.
On the FLIP SIDE:
- Give too much freedom to Morons and good tools become ugly.
Which is why the iPad / iPhone has a minimal UI / Button mindset. Love it, but so many people including me want to Jailbreak and many are going Android.
The simple thing to do:
- Basic Mode
- Custom/ Advanced Mode
It doesnt have much impact / overhead on the MARKUP that stores the HIGHLIGHT information.