Text Wrap / Text Reflow
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And another year without this crucial feature. Vivaldi could be the best browser, but without this feature it will not be usable.
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is there any example website to see the text-wrap behavior difference between opera, uc, vivaldi and others ?
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Just reminding again...
So this feature will come to top again!It's a must have feature, without it surfing web on small mobile devices is a pain
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I started using vivaldi on desktop a few days ago, very nice tool, a user centered browser finally, like opera in its old days.
Yes, I would like to have a word wrap feature like opera on mobile vivaldi too, web pages are meant to be read. Zooming text is fine, but constantly scrolling horizontally is pure horror.
Its hard to believe that wrapping around on a device border can be subject of a protected patent. Its a straight forward thing, totally natural. Kill patent offices first
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@ascaris Opera is based on Chromium if I recall correctly, so the text wrap function was developed by Opera itself, not by Google. Since Vivaldi is some sort of spin-off from Opera, I am hoping the code to text wrap on mobile (where it is more useful than on any other platform resolution) still is available somewhere.
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@vectorwhiz The text wrap option was, indeed, developed by Opera after they abandoned their roots and cleaved to Chromium. They had over 200 developers to work on the Chromium conversion and as part of that effort, they developed this text wrap function. It is their property. It is only on mobile and, interestingly, was mainly developed in connection with how to display on Apple systems.
Vivaldi was founded by a co-founder of Opera, co-founder BEFORE they switched to Chromium, who really wanted Opera to stick to the Presto engine (developed under his leadership), which would have required hiring even more developers. Investors in Opera, who came to control the company, decided to drop the Presto engine and go with Chromium. Jon, the Co-founder, could not agree with the new direction and left the company. He though Opera would continue with a customization and features philosophy. They did not.
So, totally independently from Opera, and using none of their code base, Jon decided to start developing the Vivaldi browser. He did it based on the customization and features philosophy, which he felt Opera had abandoned. He retained NO rights to Opera developments or technology. He had to start afresh. Vivaldi is, in no sense, any kind of "spin-off" from Opera. It has no Opera code or basis, but is a completely different direction.
So if Vivaldi wants text-wrap, it will have to write it from scratch, with 10% of the Opera development workforce, and be careful in the process not to violate Opera's IP rights.
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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%3BThe Details Guy at Vivaldi.
Do NOT run commands in the browser developer console if you do not understand what the command does! -
@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/ )
