Tuesday Tech Tip: Paragraph selection on iPhone & iPad
Most iPhone and iPad users know that you can tap and hold onto any text within iOS to select it, then by using the little draggable bars, you can adjust the size of the text selection rather easily too. While this is great for selecting a single word, a sentence, and even a small block of text, it’s not so great for choosing to highlight large groups of words like a lengthy paragraph, or just a generally large block of text. But not to worry, it turns out that iOS has a much better way of selecting large text blocks in one fell swoop, and it uses an easy to remember tap gesture that seems to be so little known that it’d almost qualify as a secret…
Navigate on screen to the large continuous text block to highlight all together, typically a paragraph
Use a two-finger tap directly onto the paragraph to instantly select the entire paragraph or group of contiguous words
Michael Sauers is the Director of Logan Library in Logan, UT. Prior to this he was one of the founding staff and Technology Manager for Do Space in Omaha, NE. After earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany's School of Information Science and Policy Michael spent his first 20 years as a librarian training other librarians in technology along with time as a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, a technology consultant, and a bookseller. He has written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and has published 14 books ranging from library technology, blogging, Web design, and an index to a popular horror magazine. In his spare time, he blogs at TravelinLibrarian.info, runs The Collector's Guide to Dean Koontz website at CollectingKoontz.com, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are my own and are not to be considered those of the City of Logan, UT.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
Most iPhone and iPad users know that you can tap and hold onto any text within iOS to select it, then by using the little draggable bars, you can adjust the size of the text selection rather easily too. While this is great for selecting a single word, a sentence, and even a small block of text, it’s not so great for choosing to highlight large groups of words like a lengthy paragraph, or just a generally large block of text. But not to worry, it turns out that iOS has a much better way of selecting large text blocks in one fell swoop, and it uses an easy to remember tap gesture that seems to be so little known that it’d almost qualify as a secret…
