What I need is a prototype or an example of how to create a text boxe interaction where the selection or marking of specific text (such as a specific word in a sentence) activates a new text box under the first one.
Like this: You select or mark a specific word in Text box A which creates a new box (Text Box B) with a clarification or elaboration of the word that has been marked or selected in Text Box A.
Just stumbled across your post and thought I might take a crack at it.
(I also went through the effort of figuring something out before I noticed the topic was almost a year old. {sigh} Oh well, hopefully it will be useful to someone…)
There’s a few ways to achieve what you’re going for:
The “easiest” is to use JavaScript injection and write the selected text to a global variable.
If we’re sticking to native Axure, the first obstacle is there is no “select text” event or trigger; the closest thing is “Mouse Button Up”. The next is only firing that event when certain words are selected. The paragraph widget may have a lot of words in it but it still is just one, “all-or-nothing”, object.
One approach is to “build” a paragraph out of individual label widgets or place label widgets above a paragraph so they look like they are inline. This would give you the full range of interactions available and getting the needed behavior would be pretty straight forward.
Another way is to use inline text links. It’s more complicated but it makes resizing and modifying the text a lot easier. Text links are kind of “pseudo-widgets”. They have a very limited set of allowed interactions and styling but they are unique “things” that can have different behaviors.
Any which way you slice it, using text selection as a “trigger” is kind of a pain. Using OnHover is easier and a lot less error prone. A user can’t accidentally select too much or too little to properly fire the event.
Selected_Text_Popup.rp (104.8 KB)