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PreTeXt: an authoring and publishing system for scholarly documents
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Annotation/drawing tool in right margin #1636

Open Alex-Jordan opened 2 years ago

Alex-Jordan commented 2 years ago

While teaching, sometimes I might want to put up an exercise on the screen straight from the HTML, like one of these: https://spot.pcc.edu/math/orcca/ed2/html/section-solving-rational-equations.html

With a wide screen, there is a lot of white space in the right margin. One way to use this could be for "hand" writing a solution, if there were some kind of annotation/drawing tool available. The grading tools in my LMS allow for this on a PDF for example. It could be ephemeral or persist using local storage.

First thoughts, I imagine a canvas element that you can "pin" to a block, like an exercise or an example. That is used to position the canvas element, and it would move as you scroll the page.

davidfarmer commented 2 years ago

Do you assume you have a tablet device with a pen, from which you are projecting to a screen?

Would it be sufficient to have a "canvas" button on the page, similar to the calculator button? Maybe the canvas can be moved around and resized as needed.

On Tue, 9 Nov 2021, Alex Jordan wrote:

While teaching, sometimes I might want to put up an exercise on the screen straight from the HTML, like one of these: https://spot.pcc.edu/math/orcca/ed2/html/section-solving-rational-equations.html

With a wide screen, there is a lot of white space in the right margin. One way to use this could be for "hand" writing a solution, if there were some kind of annotation/drawing tool available. The grading tools in my LMS allow for this on a PDF for example. It could be ephemeral or persist using local storage.

First thoughts, I imagine a canvas element that you can "pin" to a block, like an exercise or an example. That is used to position the canvas element, and it would move as you scroll the page.

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Alex-Jordan commented 2 years ago

It's nice to use tools like this with a stylus pen or a touch screen. But a mouse works too in a pinch. And the tool should allow for a text box where you are just typing.

Not necessarily projecting to a screen. The other scenarios that come to mind are (a) screen sharing in a video meeting. Zoom (for example) has its own tools for that, but they don't "stick" to where you want them to be. And (b) if student can do this and it persists, it could augment their note-taking and book reading.

Yes, a generic canvas drawing button would be good. Still better though if you can click it again to start a new one. Each one gets "pinned" somewhere.

sean-fitzpatrick commented 2 years ago

Aside from the desire for persistence, this is something that is already supported on some browsers, including Chrome (via extension) and Edge (naively, I think, unless that was "old" Edge).

I see students doing this in the classroom, although usually they are using something like the Snip+Sketch in Windows, or OneNote. So they grab an image of the page and then annotate. I do this in class as well, when students have homework questions.

So if this was present, it would be used. Without it, there are workarounds.

Alex-Jordan commented 2 years ago

That's interesting, and it would be nice to outsource to tools like that. A subtle thing that I still wonder about: can you lock the position of your drawing relative to content? I hate it when I have an example on screen in Zoom and I used Zoom tools to annotate; and then I need to scroll up a little on the page and my annotations are all pointing to the wrong things now. At first I thought a PreTeXt-specific tool would be needed to lock things onto block elements, but maybe the existing tools out there can do this.

sean-fitzpatrick commented 2 years ago

The extension I'm using in Chrome is called page marker. I chose it because it was somebody's hobby project, and didn't ask for any data or permissions (unlike several other options I considered, but this was a year ago).

The markings are relative to the page content. If you scroll, so do the markings.

It also knows what tab it should be on, so if you switch tabs, you won't see it on the other tabs.

Only problem is that it's not persistent. If you close the tool or reload the page, you lose whatever markings you made.