Text Wrap / Text Reflow
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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...
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Text should fit the screen automatically without having to scroll side-to-side, regardless of size.
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This single missed feature prevents me from switching to Vivaldi from Opera.
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@dmitrik Agreed. When I first tried Android in the 4.0 ICS days, I tried every browser I could find, and there was only one that came close, and that was Opera (Presto). It was as close to a perfect browser as I have ever seen in mobile... but even then it was apparently getting sort of long in the tooth, and it didn't want to finish loading any pages, and it would partially hang while waiting.
Firefox had text reflow then, but it was really buggy, often taking you to random points in the page after you zoomed (and zoomed in that far it was hard to see where in the page you had been before), and rather than fix it, they opted to remove it until such time that it could be reimplemented correctly. It's been the better part of a decade, and they still haven't done it.
Boat browser had reflow back then, but it was buggy too, like Firefox's, and the person who said UC seems like malware is right-- it's doing just as s/he said, and that's not acceptable.
Text reflow is one of those must-have features for mobile, and it's a real shame that it's so rare. That and a single-bar UI at the top that didn't disappear (I was using a tablet at the time) were my main requirements, and only Opera (later Opera Classic) fit. Even the newer Chropera didn't tick all the boxes.
I am not sure why this seems to be so difficult to do well. Is it really any different than the initial text flow at page load? But maybe it is, given how only Opera seems to have done it well. I hope Vivaldi can do it eventually (or at least for Google to do so, and then it could find its way into Vivaldi by way of Chromium).
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@Ayespy Just to make sure, when you are talking about "copyright" do you mean Opera's patent on text wrapping? https://patents.google.com/patent/US9378188
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@Ascaris said in Text Wrap option:
I am not sure why this seems to be so difficult to do well.
Because it IS really, really hard to do. It borders on artificial intelligence. It has to see the page with nearly-human eyes, in the context of both the platform and of the language being displayed, and adjust everything just-so in the case of each page, each individual device size, word-length, etc. Did you know, for instance, that in the relatively mundane world of translation, the same text box sizes will not work for both English and German? People assume simplicity where there is vast complexity.
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@scarfhogg Essentially, yes.
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It has been painful to use any mobile browser after the Kitkat days.... That was the very last time when it was normal to have such a normal feature. BTW that is the main reason why I have opera installed in almost every mobile device. Like in this very moment I have this same page opened on an 8.4 inch tablet and its just painful to read it with vivaldi while it's OK with opera. I'm afraid that someone will soon post something like "but you can increase text size"..... No definetly not. In a desktop browser I decide each style and heading which font and size shall have, and a mobile device is even more powerful than conputers that are not even that old.
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@knosso
Hi, iirc the problem with this feature is it is patented from Opera and therefor not even Chrome can implement it easily.
Is there any other browser with this feature?Cheers, mib
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Kiwi browser already have this feature and it is open source also.
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The lack of this feature prevents me from switching from Opera to Vivaldi on mobile devices... I'd love to dispose Opera completely, but I do need this feature (low vision)...
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@ayespy Sad to hear this. Maybe you can revive some old contacts to your friends in the Opera team. They do pretty well on this job. And they have implemented it quite some time ago already.
For me, this is the reason why I (have to) use Opera on my mobile device. It's a crucial feature on these tiny screens, especially for people with impaired eyesight
