Hello all,
I’m looking for a good solution to provide “smart quoting” for an app
I’m making. The end-user workflow I’m hoping to accomplish is this:
-
User reads entry, ie a blog post or a news article
-
User highlights a passage in the entry in his browser
-
User clicks a link in the page and a form appears. The form’s text
area should contain the highlighted text. (This is one step I’m unsure
of how to accomplish. So far all I’ve found is JS to copy a pre-
selected passage that is already wrapped in a DIV.) -
The user submits the form, eventually via AJAX, and is returned to
the entry. The entry model would has_many :quotes, or :comments, or
whatever fits the context naming-wise. That form would add a new one
to the entry. The quote model would validate against the parent entry
to ensure that the content of the quote is actually contained within
the body of the entry. -
Additionally, I’m hoping to make a link next to each quote clickable
that will then use JS to find the passage within the entry’s body, and
wrap it in a DIV to highlight the text in a new color, background, and
space it off from the rest of the entry. (This is something else I’m
unsure of, but I think I’ll find it easy enough to figure out on my
own.)
Any thoughts? Again, I’ve looked briefly for javascript to interact
with copying/pasting, but the main point I’m stuck on is just getting
what the user has highlighted.
Thanks for your time,
Shane Sveller