Suggestion Highlighting

Would it be possible to get a dropdown next to text color to set text background color for selected text? Even a small assortment of tasteful, non-bright colors would be a very big help in composing critiques.

With only text color, once you use red for deletions, blue for comments, and possibly green for insertions, you're pretty much out of easily distinguishable options for marking duplicated words or good phrases/observations or things like that. Plus having highlighting, one could mirror a clear distinction between suggested edits (colored text) and marking word / phrases / passages for commentary or appreciation (by highlight).

 

That might be getting too fancy. You have other options, like italics or bold, both, underline, Bigger Text, smaller text

Or you can indent a section.​

You also have various grays.

 

It's true one can do all those things (except quoting in-line), though embiggening text is the only really visible one (especially inside a quote or spoiler) and disrupts line spacing—but they're still workarounds.

Background highlighting is already for many years the de facto standard in exchanged Word documents (because it's how Word indicates the scope of marginal comments, and ditto Google Docs) both in critique groups and business environments, and also in commenting on in-email drafts and such, where all the applied formatting typically "belongs" to the drafter and the draft itself, and then the commenter or approver applies highlighting to mark words, phrases, or areas referenced outside the text block—and to make sure that subtle edits like commas don't get overlooked.

I typically mark (without further comment) many dozens of particularly apt word choices, phrasings, observations, etc, if I find them, so I often have more of those than corrections or suggestions. (I realize I'm abnormally prolific in encouraging / reinforcing the details that shine—even the small one-word ones or unusually good choices of punctuation—and not merely pointing out the ones that need improvement, but I do believe it's an essential part of helping writers become their best.) Indicating such details is proving tedious to the point that I'm marking half or less what I would in a Word document. I suppose bolding would do (and requires only keystrokes, a plus), but some writers are already using bold in their text proper. And bolding is not all that visible without removing the QUOTE tags and treating a quoted submission as body text of the comment-post. I'm reluctant to expand the on-page footprint that much.

Assuming XenForo is still built on Froala as its Rich Text Editor, background highlighting is already built into Froala and may only need enabling. If ugly aesthetics are a worry, the one-click highlighting colors can be limited to gentle ones. Lemon chiffon, light sage, very light orange, and light violet would suffice. Even two would be a huge improvement.

Far be it from me to make waves, but the lack of background highlighting is so far the only conspicuous omission I've noticed in this particular application of what appears otherwise to be the most advanced forum system available today.

ON EDIT: Oh—now I see from big moose's comment elsewhere (and the page source) that it's an older version of XF that uses Redactor, so I don't know if adding highlighting is (nearly) as simple as enabling it. I won't mention highlighting again, but it sure would be a useful minor refinement that would much improve the readability of critiques I make.

 

Okay, "good" to know. I think I grasp the picture now.