Greetings,
As a UI designer, it is currently difficult to highlight text (not as in how you do so in TextBoxes with the dragging of the cursor). I’m talking this kind of highlighting:
Currently, the only possible way is through frames placed ever-so-perfectly around a string of characters of a text, which is unideal and tedious to do. While this can allow for further customization that conventional text highlighting, such as rounded corners, the use cases for such customizations are niche (most of the time, a simple rectangular area is good enough).
Therefore, the support for highlighting would make the most sense with the RichText font tag since it houses color as well:
<font highlight = "#ffff00"></font>
<font highlight = "#ffff00" color = "0000ff"></font>
--it'd also be nice to have an alpha channel for this
<font highlight = "#ffff00ff"></font> --opaque
<font highlight = "#ffff00aa"></font> --semi transparent
Use Cases
There are some nifty uses, although I can only describe them and not show them:
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Newspaper stories cutscene – to show that an event has blown up all across the press, the cutscene shows various newspapers with the main subject and all related info being highlighted character-by-character.
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Cozy text background – using Frames or directly using the text’s background property usually makes the bounds of the backgrounds too large or too small in relation to the text bounds, but with highlighting you can slap on the font tag and have a dynamic, well-fitting background.
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Notes – especially in horror games that utilize notes from previous victims or just writing on lined paper in general, certain words/phrases need to be highlighted, which is usually better that simple coloring in this context.
If this was added, it’d improve my development experience because the above common use cases would be simple to achieve and RichText would be further enriched with text-dressing tools of goodness. Instead of having to design a manual system with positioning and sizing Frames that may as well be expensive, including internal support would be far more optimal and accessible.
Thank you.