Question

Let’s say a user selects (with his/her mouse) the first line of a paragraph. Later, he/she selects another line farther down the page. Is there a way to keep the previously selected text (in addition to the newly selected text) highlighted? How could I go about achieving this?

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Yes, you can do this with a combination of checking the mouseDown/mouseUp event, and document.selection/getSelection.

The general logic is this:

1. On mouse down, save the current value of document.selection into an array, if there was a selection
2. On mouse up, check to see if there is anything selected. If so, add it to the same array
3. Redo the selection manually by adding every range in that array

It would behoove you to use something to handle cross-browser implementation. Check out this guy’s snippet