Can super_editor be used to let users add highlights and notes to text?

[jcpsantiago]

👋 hello! I'm new to flutter (via ClojureDart) and I'm feeling overwhelmed with the super_editor package, so I'm looking for help.

I wrote a book reader app (knowuro.com). Our books are written in Markdown and currently we render them with flutter_markdown_plus after splitting the Markdown document by header (A "block" looks like this # foo\n\nThis is the paragraph.) and each widget's key is equal to the hash of the content — I found this to be easiest way to implement search and cross-references across books so that when a user clicks a search result or cross-reference link they jump to the block.

Now, I want to let the users select some text and then either add a highlight or add a note. Outside the note, which should be a simple text input, I want text to always be read-only.

So far I've been playing with:

• deserializeMarkdownToDocument to go from (a single) Markdown document to a MutableDocument (is mutable what I want?)
• createDefaultDocumentEditor to create an editor
• and finally feed this to SuperReader

The above renders the document 👍

Now I'm not sure what would be the best way forward to implement the highlighting and the "jump to widget" functionality I mention above.

• Any rough pointers on how to go about adding/removing highlights/notes to selected text?
• "Jump to block" is implemented via keys now — can the same be done with super editor? I don't see a way to add a key to the deserialize method, so maybe I'm expected to build the document node by node?

In general any pointers are appreciated :) this package is quite large and I've been reading the source code for a few days but I haven't wrapped my head around it yet.

[matthew-carroll]

Hi @jcpsantiago are you primarily struggling with the initialization of a SuperReader? Or were you able to figure that out and you're primarily struggling with scrolling to a location in the document?

[jcpsantiago]

I'm struggling to understand:

• How to store and then render a markdown document in a way conducive to let users add highlights and notes across arbitrary spans of text eg should I store markdown blocks and then process them into documents to be used in superreader? Should I keep everything into a single string and have only one document?
• It is not clear how I can completely disable editing and use only the Reader eg if I double tap I don't want to see the cursor
• It is not clear how I can select text and get access to coordinates or ids or offsets which let me create highlights and then store them they are rendered again when the user opens the same markdown document; I also want to let the user see which highligbtes and notes they create then tap on one of them and jump to that location, same thing with search results: tap a search result then jump to location and highlight that section of text which I got from the search result (non permanently in this case).

That what I'm trying to do, and I feel SuperReader is my ticket to build this. However, I'm having trouble understand the ontology of objects relevant for SuperReader, and whether my assumption SuperReader is ideal for this is correct. I hope this makes sense :)