Text Wrap / Text Reflow
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I guess ebook readers use text wrap too. Maybe there is something patent-free that helps.
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@bariton Calibre and FBReader are open-source. Don't know how compatible their code would be with a browser.
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How can we support development of text wrap? Can someone contact authors of Calibre and ask to share code? My coding is weak...how may I help? Can we raise money, is there enough demand?
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I just ping-resurrect this thread for a moment again... since I'd still really appreciate this feature.
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Kiwi Browser [ https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next ] has the feature.
Haven't adequately tested, but seems to be working.
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It is licensed under the same license as Chromium. -
To everyone who wants text wrap: please do not forget to vote up the first post with your thumb.
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I needed to do some long form reading on mobile so I wanted to increase the font size. I noticed that if I do that through settings, rather than pinch to zoom, I can change the font size and get pretty decent text reflow. So the functionality is already there, it just needs a good set of controls for enabling the zoom.
I won't be so naïve as to say that makes adding this functionality any easier, though.
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Check out the most recent Snapshot for some new zoom options in Settings > Accessibility and the main menu. I think a lot of you will like the new settings.
If you encounter any issues or have some feedback, please comment below the latest Snapshot blog or report the issue on vivaldi.com/bugreport. -
Hi, ya’ll. The option for setting the minimum text-size should fit the bill for most users.
Nevertheless, could you please share some examples of pages that benefit from reflow or wrapping? (I’m not interested in reflow-on-zoom at this time. Default zoom-level only!) Include the page URL, and which browser you tested with, and whether you’re using mobile or desktop mode. Please double-check with and without the setting.
Oh, and here’s a barebones prototype for anyone who can use JavaScript incantations/bookmarklets:
javascript:document.documentElement.style.maxWidth%3Dwindow.visualViewport.width%2B%22px%22%3B
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@daniel Is it a minimum text‐size option? I can only find the Zoom option in Accessibility, which makes text on all websites larger, no matter whether it was already large enough on the majority of websites.
Vivaldi works well on most webpages anyway, there’s only an issue when a page doesn’t care about mobile users at all, for example ☛ https://www.scaruffi.com/politics/world22.html#world0722. Opera’s wrapping works wonders for such pages. Interestingly reader view for this page is available on desktop, but doesn’t work well and the accessibility option »simplified view for webpages« doesn’t come up on mobile. A proper reader view for Android would make wrapping obsolete in most cases, the simplified view just doesn’t cut it and has the annoying popup.
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@daniel Just to chime in here as someone who's quietly kept an eye on this feature request from time to time: it's only the zoom text reflow feature that I'm interested in. It's the reason I use Opera on mobile and why I dislike other mobile browsers. (I love Vivaldi on the desktop, btw - visual tabs are a killer feature.)
As someone who spends a lot of time in front of computers (as a software dev/architect), I've started to need glasses more and more. When I use my phone (Samsung Note 10+ which is a large-ish device) to read news sites, if I don't have my glasses on, sometimes I'll zoom in on a page to make the text bigger. In Opera, the text wraps to the zoom level. In other browsers, this doesn't happen and I'd have to manually scroll around to read each line.
Whilst I can see how Opera has copyright to their code (because it's their code), I don't see how they can claim any patent or intellectual property (as mentioned by a mod on here) against wrapping / reflowing text to meet a zoom level because this would surely also then apply to any browser that supported responsive websites. Text reflowing/wrapping to a window size is something that happened back when I used Netscape Navigator all those years ago (though, on a phone, instead of making the app window smaller, you zoom in).
Could this feature not be achieved by the browser resizing the (HTML element) box within which the text is contained to the width of the screen? I think the issue is not that text does not wrap, it's that when you zoom in, the box model isn't resized (decreased) to fit the screen width. If this can then only apply to text, then you've solved the problem.
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@Ascy While reading your comment it just occurred to me that having a text zoom separate from a page zoom is actually what you're after and might be a way to circumvent a patent (although I admit I have no idea how it's written, so may not be the case).
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@pauloaguia, that's a really good point and probably a better solution. If in the Vivaldi drop down menu, there was a tick box option to toggle 'zoom page' and 'zoom text', that would be super useful. Then, if you use the zoom-in finger action, it would increase the size of the text. If you need to zoom in on the page, you simply untick the option.
Hopefully that would be easy to implement without a page reload.
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@Ascy said in Text Wrap option:
@pauloaguia, that's a really good point and probably a better solution. If in the Vivaldi drop down menu, there was a tick box option to toggle 'zoom page' and 'zoom text', that would be super useful. Then, if you use the zoom-in finger action, it would increase the size of the text. If you need to zoom in on the page, you simply untick the option.
Hopefully that would be easy to implement without a page reload.
I don't think it's that simple. Maybe for pages with nothing on the sides that might work, but on pages with left and right columns zooming in on just the text would render everything unreadable. I frequent several forums that do not have the mobile version, and with Vivaldi I have a tremendous effort, while with Opera mobile they are used very well (example: https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/ )
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I just realized this feature is tagged as being in Progress.
Hopefully that means we'll see it in one of the next releases -
the search shows that there were dozens of these topics-queries of the most complex "Wrap-text" function. the earliest is 14 Dec 2018. I.e. it has been almost 5 years. These topics have been drying up in the archive for a long time. I recently discussed with Representative @Shpankov. The answer is Opera 's patented technology .
But I didn't know that the first requests appeared 5 years ago.
But what is there to patent ? Wrap is a built-in function in CSS -- Flexbox --- display:flex; , flex-wrap: wrap;
This also works on mobile.
An example from a PC for Devtools. But it is clear that everyone is asking for this feature for the mobile version.
Is it really forbidden to repeat it?
Is it impossible to solve the problem in 5 years ? -
@sphera Why does only Opera browser provide it? Granted, I haven’t looked at other mobile browsers in a long time, but I’m not aware of any which do wrap properly.
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Ok, so why don’t Chrome, Firefox, and Safari do it? It’s a pretty obvious feature.
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Now there is a scale in Vivaldi. Let's analyze it. Now we know how it works. The browser just scales all the elements of the page -- everything is absolutely ! Including spaces, intervals and the page itself. And it does not matter that the page ceases to fit into the browser screen.
What is the benefit to the reader if he sees only part of the page? I have checked now on various forums -- this function, which the Vivaldi team has been developing for a long time, made efforts, spent a lot of time -- it is no different from the built-in Android (???) functions -- "2 fingers"
What is the smallest element of the page ? -- TEXT ! Only text is the reason for scaling. There are no icon-sized pictures on the pages, they ended in the 90s. It is necessary to start developing the scale of the page from the text, and not everything in a row that is on the page. %If the text is not readable, then it should be increased by 300%. And what happens to a page if everything on it (pictures, intervals) is increased by 300%?
The new zoom function is a useless function - the user has it all as soon as he received a mobile phone. -
if the topic is about Text-Wrap, then here is a screenshot. I agree, this is a rare case - a long line.
there are really difficult cases -- this line is 3 times longer than in the photo.
But I think Vivaldi programmers will be able to write a complex function -- cut a string anywhere. And it's better not in any, but strictly according to the size of the phone screen. I don't need the text that's behind the screen. On any scale.
I don't think it's hard.