Continuous Highlight
I'd like to request a "continuous highlight" feature. What do I mean by that.
Say there is a paragraph. I highlight important and relevant parts of several sentences from that paragraph. Normally, when you view the pdf in Acrobat Reader all is highlighted and fine. For this type of work you don't need a "continuous highlight" as you can see the highlights on the page.
But a lot of people extract annotations from PDFs for research. Adobe is great for reading, re-reading, and annotation making, but when work is done I need to extract the annotations into an interrelated database. The problem with short highlights after being extracted is that you don't have a clue what they are. The skill of highlighting comes with practice, sure, but we still highlight parts of sentences.
After the notes from our example paragraph are extracted, each highlight appears as a new line.
My proposed "continuous highlight" would let you select as many words as you want from different sentences and save it as 1 highlight — visually in Acrobat it'd appear the same. Every time 2 nearest words would be from different sentences or paragraphs an ellipsis would be added to the extraction.
Example of paragraph (highlights marked with ><, as I don't see graphical edit in this forum)
Lorem ipsum<< dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer nec odio. Praesent libero. Sed cursus ante dapibus diam. Sed nisi. Nulla quis sem at nibh >>elementum imperdiet. Duis sagittis ipsum<<. Praesent mauris. Fusce nec tellus sed augue semper porta. Mauris massa. Vestibulum lacinia arcu eget nulla. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos.>> Curabitur sodales ligula<< in libero. Sed dignissim lacinia nunc.
Example of Continuous Highlight in extracted form
Lorem ipsum … elementum imperdiet. Duis sagittis ipsum … Curabitur sodales ligula …
This would be very, very handy. Also first of its kind afaik.
Thanks.
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Anonymous commented
Here is a more relevant example of practical use.
"Management by direction and control—whether implemented with the hard, the soft, or the firm but fair approach—fails under today’s conditions to provide effective motivation of human effort toward organizational objectives. It fails because direction and control are useless methods of motivating people whose physiological and safety needs are reasonably satisfied and whose social, egoistic, and self-fulfillment needs are predominant."
With Continuous (or Selective, if you will) Highlight I could omit the part enclosed in the em dashes. So the highlight would look like this...
"Management by direction and control … fails under today’s conditions to provide effective motivation of human effort toward organizational objectives. It fails because direction and control are useless methods of motivating people whose physiological and safety needs are reasonably satisfied and whose social, egoistic, and self-fulfillment needs are predominant."