Highlighting issues in Shakespeare plays

[Austin]

Hello,

I did not see this issue mentioned after searching for it so decided to create a new conversation.

I have not been able to highlight any of the three Shakespeare plays I've read via Standard Ebooks so far: Richard III, MacBeth, and Othello. 

For example, taking Richard III, I cannot highlight the opening two lines, "Now is the winter of our discontent, Made glorious summer by the sun of York;". I cannot highlight this passage on any device running Apple Books, iPad, Mac, or iPhone. I have not tested this on other e-readers.

Highlighting is an important part of my note taking workflows and I imagine would be an important feature for many other readers as well. As a technical person I can imagine that it would be a substantial effort to figure out how to make Shakespeare plays (and maybe other poetry-formatted works?) highlight-friendly, so I do not pretend to know how to solve this problem, but I do think it is a problem worth discussing to see if there's a way to support it.

Thank you,

Austin Gatlin

PS Thank you for this project and all the work you all do building SE, it is meaningful and appreciated <3

[Vince Rice]

This is a known problem. We currently use tables to format drama, and Books has a table viewer when you click on one. We disabled that on drama since it’s not a “real” table, but that also disables highlighting.

There was some work underway to see if we could use other means to get the same formatting for drama, but I don’t know the current status.

> On Apr 21, 2025, at 10:44 AM, Austin <austin....@gmail.com> wrote:
> 

[Weijia Cheng]

This is a known issue and there is some ongoing work on this, however it would require a major refactor across all dramatic productions: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/issues/780

[Robin Whittleton]

Yeah, I’m still working on it, albeit slowly. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer.

-Robin

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