Enable highlighting in reading view

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

Highlighting text in Obsidian Mobile is extremely frustrating for users who want an immersive reading experience and need to highlight text. Having to switch to Source Mode or Live Preview just to highlight text messes up the reading flow and makes it tough to manage and mark up notes efficiently. Additionally, there is a bug that makes the highlights on Live Preview and Source Mode overlap the tools where the highlighting option is located, making things even more difficult.

Proposed solution

Implement a feature that allows users to highlight text directly within Reading View. This enhancement would streamline the reading and note-taking process, making it more intuitive and less frustrating. By enabling highlighting in Reading View, users can seamlessly annotate their notes without the need to constantly switch views, thereby improving overall productivity and user satisfaction.

Current workaround (optional)

Currently, users must switch to either Source Mode or Live Preview to highlight text, which is time-consuming and interrupts the flow of reading and note-taking. This workaround is not ideal and hampers the user experience significantly.

Related feature requests (optional)

There are similar suggestion but don’t explain the issue thoroughly.

11 Likes
2

I also like this feature, it would be awesome for mobile users who read in Obsidian.

3

Definitely. I’m trying to adopt the “Progressive Summarization” technique where I re-read things, adding boldface and/or highlighting to help distill things to their essence.

Reading View is ideal for the re-reading part… but obviously adding the bold/highlight features is not currently available.

4

People interested in highlight tools are invited to check out my wiki: Text-highlight because I stumbled over the same issues and solved 'em a long time ago.
Till Obsidian doesn’t add better highlights, we need to use other ways. BTW, with my method you don’t have to add “ugly” HTML code.

5

Definitely, with Obsidian Web Clipper, Obsidian now has a potential of becoming a solid read-later app. What Obsidian needs is a usable mobile reading interface, with one click highlighting in reading mode, and a continue-from button on the new tab screen.

1 Like
6

can you explain how you solved it? i cannot see how the highlight is implemented.

7

I believe you would have to download the Dune theme, and study the CSS (or just use the theme). That link is to a page showing how that theme looks (as far as I understand).