I am looking for a way to select text on a website in Chrome and have a overlay/tooltip pop with content depending on the text selection.
Has anyone done this before or knows from the top of their heads how to make the toolip pop-up?
Much appreciated.
All you need to do is listen for mouse events:
- mousedown: to hide the bubble.
- mouseup: to show the bubble.
For example, this might help you get started. More tweaks are needed, to figure out if you initiated the selection from down->up, right->left, etc (all directions). You can use the following code as a startup:
contentscript.js
// Add bubble to the top of the page.
var bubbleDOM = document.createElement('div');
bubbleDOM.setAttribute('class', 'selection_bubble');
document.body.appendChild(bubbleDOM);
// Lets listen to mouseup DOM events.
document.addEventListener('mouseup', function (e) {
var selection = window.getSelection().toString();
if (selection.length > 0) {
renderBubble(e.clientX, e.clientY, selection);
}
}, false);
// Close the bubble when we click on the screen.
document.addEventListener('mousedown', function (e) {
bubbleDOM.style.visibility = 'hidden';
}, false);
// Move that bubble to the appropriate location.
function renderBubble(mouseX, mouseY, selection) {
bubbleDOM.innerHTML = selection;
bubbleDOM.style.top = mouseY + 'px';
bubbleDOM.style.left = mouseX + 'px';
bubbleDOM.style.visibility = 'visible';
}
contentscript.css
.selection_bubble {
visibility: hidden;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
background:-webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#2e88c4), to(#075698));
}
manifest.json
Change the matches portion to the domain you want to inject these content scripts.
...
...
"content_scripts": [
{
"matches": ["http://*/*"],
"css": ["main.css"],
"js": ["main.js"],
"run_at": "document_end",
"all_frames": true
}
...
...
If you want to style it to look like a bubble, Nicolas Gallagher did some awesome CSS3 demos for bubbles!
I wrote something similar to what you're asking about. I listened for the user to select text and when there was a selection, I displayed a list of links for things like "Note on Facebook", "Define", etc.
A day or two after I started to write it, I found that google was going to add context menu support in a future release so I didn't touch this until recently (when I converted to context menus).
Take a look at the code:
http://code.google.com/p/select-actions/source/browse/trunk/select_actions.js?r=4
If nobody provides a better answer then you might look at how Google Dictionary extension does it (it would be hard as its code is minimized).