Text Wrap / Text Reflow
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@goedl It's special coding and not at all trivial to implement. It must be written from scratch by the crew, and has to not accidentally violate copyright. There are two methods to do this of which I am aware, both of which are the property of another company. Vivaldi has to devise their own solution.
Volunteer Mod and tester on Windows 11 Home X64, i7-13700 @ 5.4 GHz turbo; Intel UHD 770 graphics; 1TB NV2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD; 32 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Community Code of Conduct
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@Ayespy Thanks for that post, that's new information to me. I think most of us out here in End User Land never give a thought to the possibility that coding methods themselves can be copyrighted. That makes it a lot clearer why wrap seems to be so absent in mobile browsers across the board.
What's needed is for some kind coder to write a unique method and open-source GPL it! Anybody?
I guess the question for now then becomes; Would you speculate our guys will be able to do it at some point? It's SO unique to Opera Mobile at the moment it would surely bring a lot of new users in.
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@Ayespy Well, I'm not a professional programmer and I hate to deal with copyright issues. I think they are just ridiculous. But I'm pretty sure this kind of text reflow feature was once part of the AOSP stock browser. As far as I know the AOSP source is published under Apache licence, so probably it is not illegal to use some code included there. Unfortunately I can not show you the exact code part related to this feature, but here are some related links I found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/3sii8q/browsers_with_proper_text_reflowwrap/
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36983738
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19986305/no-more-text-reflow-after-zoom-in-kitkat-webview -
+1 support
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@dmitrik - totally the thing that keeps me using opera on my phone over any other browser - and totally understand how it is a column or cell edge detection thing so non-trivial. It makes the difference between usable and not.
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Without this feature i can't use Vivaldi or other browsers. Critically useful feature. Also this feature exist in UC
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@Ayespy Can't they just use the same method as Opera? Opera Software always touted itself as an anti-copyrights company specially in comemorative anniversary posts it was always "look at all the features we invented over the years and never worked to prevent other browsers from adopting them". I remember the sentiment against Apple patenting stuff that made it difficult to implement modern UI/touch interactions on web standards, the whole case of H.264 vs Ogg Theora (later WebM) for HTML5 video, and so on...
No text wrap in a browser is a deal breaker to me.
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@rluik Opera owns its text wrap - just because they never enforced such a right doesn't make it legal to steal. But then, Opera and Vivaldi are based on totally different architecture and building blocks, so I could not say if the pilfered code would even work in Vivaldi. I suspect not.
Volunteer Mod and tester on Windows 11 Home X64, i7-13700 @ 5.4 GHz turbo; Intel UHD 770 graphics; 1TB NV2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD; 32 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Community Code of Conduct
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@Ayespy I'm not saying to steal the code
(it may not be so different though, the also Chromium-based Opera and Yandex mobile browsers have it). I'm saying that apparently there's no copyright on the method as I've never seen any news reporting of "Opera sues other browser company over text wrap patent" yet many continue to provide and implement the feature. It was removed from Android's AOSP browser without any legal justification AFAIK.
Unless you have more information on the contracts than the general public/journalist, I can't see that as a reason. -
The most important feature I missing! Opera won't be exchanged until implementing this text fitting.
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I've gotta put myself in this camp as well. I go on a browser hunt a couple of times a year, and no one else seems to be able to pull it off. In my mind it's an essential part of the zoom feature and I can't understand how that doesn't seem obvious to everyone.
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I agree. Its critical feature for content consumption on mobile devices. We need to zoom in text very often and scrolling left to right on each line is pain in..
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@areynaldos UC Browser is the master of Text Wrap function, perfect font zooming when doing text wrap, better than Opera, where unfortunately sometimes there are very small fonts right next to bigger fonts.
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@zavalita2002 I tried UC once and it seemed like malware to me. As far as I remember it was adding its own Ads into webpages.
However, the text wrap feature is very important to me and it is one of the best features that Opera Mobile has. So after switching to Vivaldi I really miss it.
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Whenever I must have text wrap, I usually just enter reader mode. That way, I have my favorite browser on Android, and I get text wrapping on the vast majority of pages that don't implement responsive code like modern webpages should. Setting the flag "Reader mode triggering" to "always" will ensure that you have the ability to access it even on pages for which the engine doesn't decide to offer it.
I post from my phone frequently, which likes to change "the" to "three". If you see three or similar, I probably meant "the". I use swipe, so typos can be totally unrelated words to what I intended. Knowing this should help you read through my typos.
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@BoneTone I know what you're saying, but unfortunately, I have found out that the pages where I do need the text wrap are exactly the ones that don't offer the "Reader Mode" (Simplified view in Vivaldi).
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@BoneTone said in Text Wrap option:
Setting the flag "Reader mode triggering" to "always" will ensure that you have the ability to access it even on pages for which the engine doesn't decide to offer it.
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Any progress around here?
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@Ayespy It's a bad joke. The Users want this important feature since 2018? And NOTHING happend yet. Sorry, but Vivaldi now should make text wrap possible quickly.
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@Bubbel33 Well, I don't work for Vivaldi, so it's not for me to say.
I do notice however that there are 400 mobile feature requests and nearly 3000 mobile bugs, and a mobile team of only 5 to look at these, while text wrap is one of the more involved issues to address. Mobile has been released just over a year ago (this thread was opened nearly a year before release) and still doesn't even have all of the features the team had planned for it before requests began coming in. So a little perspective never hurts...
