highlighter.js

A jQuery plugin that allows for enabling tooltips on user selected text

Demo

Usage

Include the script on your page (make sure to use the correct path here)

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jQuery.highlighter.js"></script>

Activate the highlighter on the element of your choice, e.g.

$('.article').highlighter();

to deactivate it, use

$('.article').highlighter('destroy');

The styling of the tooltip is completely up to you. This library will simply show and hide it in the correct position when appropriate. You can use the selector option (see next section) to specify how highlighter.js can find your tooltip element. We have been using it with something like

<span class='highlighter-container'>
    <div>
     ... my tooltip text ...
    </div>
</span>

Where the span has an absolute position, and the div is position relative.

Options

On init you can pass in a settings object that will recognize two parameters:

$('.article').highlighter({
                           'selector': '.highlighter-container',
                           'minWords': 0
});

Where selector is the jQuery selector string of the element that you want to show upon text being selected, and minWords is the minimum number of words that have to be selected in order for the tooltip to appear. The defaults are '.highlighter-container', and 0, respectively.

Compatibility

This plugin has been tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 9.

Sightings in the Wild

If you use this project in a production project, please contact the authors or submit a pull request on this list! We like to know other people find our work helpful.

• http://www.newrepublic.com/

Authors

• Matthew Conlen, matt.conlen@huffingtonpost.com

License

Copyright © 2012 Huffington Post Labs.

This program is free software. It comes without any warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the WTFPL, Version 2, as published by Sam Hocevar. See http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ for more details.