WordCruncher Monthly
Highlighting
Highlighting has always been a common feature for eBook readers, but organizing your highlighting is tricky. It’s also not always easy to find your highlighted content again after you have marked it. With WordCruncher, you can avoid this problem entirely. Not only can you customize the colors, but you can also assign a topic to your highlighting so that you can search within the text you have already highlighted.
Highlighting can be useful for...
- marking text for qualitative data analysis.
- collecting quotes for a speech.
- sectioning text into categories.
1. Add Highlighting to Text
Before making your black and white screen colorful, you need to pick a color for your highlighting. In the toolbar at the top of WordCruncher, there are three icons for highlighting. Did you ever hold three different-colored highlighters in your hand to mark a printed book? WordCruncher allows you to set three separate highlighters at a time—without having to struggle to hold them in your hand!
Next to each highlighter icon, there is an arrow. If you click the arrow, you can change the highlighter color. Once you have set a color, select the text you would like to highlight and click the highlighter icon.
2. Assign a Topic to Highlighting
Now that you know how to highlight text, assigning a topic is your next step. Click the arrow next to the highlighter icon, and select Edit Topics.
This menu will open, allowing you to name and customize a topic.
For example, you could name a section "favorite quotes." You can also adjust the highlighter color and underline style. To add multiple topics, click the Add button. Once you have added your topic, click OK.
Now, select the text you would like to highlight and add a topic to it!
3. Search Highlighted Text
To search through the highlighted text, you will do a search using highlighter bounds. Open the search window and type in your search terms. Click the arrow next to Bounds and select Highlighter Bounds.
Select a highlighter topic and click Go.
I wanted to find a quote from The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. I knew what the quote was generally about, but the only word I could remember for certain was king. There are 986 instances of the word king throughout the series, so it would take a very long time for me to look through every search result, hoping to stumble onto the right quote.
Luckily, I remembered that it's a quote I had highlighted previously. I have a topic called "favorite quotes," so instead of searching for every instance of king in the series, I used highlighter bounds to search for the quote. This time, there were only 15 results. I found the exact quote I wanted—without wasting my time.