Highlight a passage, quote it, and ask about it

Select any run of words in a reply, or in a message, and a small pill appears beside the selection with four things you can do with it: Marker, Note, Quote, and Copy. Highlights work in your own chats and in shared ones.

Highlight

Choose Marker and pick a colour: purple, pink, orange, mint, or blue. Those words carry the mark from then on, for everyone in the chat. Selections snap to whole words, and you can drag either end of the selection to adjust it before you mark it.

Click a highlight to open its card: who marked it, their note if they wrote one, the replies under it, and a box to add one. From the card you can recolour the highlight, set it back to None, or remove it. The author can rewrite the note.

If your selection crosses inline code, a bold phrase or a link, the mark is drawn on the longest run that can be marked and the highlight shows what was taken. A selection made entirely of code cannot be highlighted.

Write a note on a highlight

Choose Note instead of Marker, or add one from the highlight's card. A note says why the passage matters: "this is the number we disagreed on", "check this against the spec". People reply to notes the way they reply to comments, with @name mentions if someone needs to see it.

Ask Dropstone about a passage

Name @dropstone in a highlight's note, or in a reply under it, and Dropstone answers beside that passage, not in the conversation. It reads the exact words you marked, so "is this still true after the change above?" needs no further explanation.

A highlight and its notes are not sent to Dropstone on ordinary turns until someone opens the Visible to Dropstone pill on the card. The author or the chat's owner can do that. Once open, the passage, the note and its replies travel with every turn, next to the announcements and comment threads. In your own chat, your notes reach Dropstone as yours.

Quote a passage into a question

Choose Quote and the passage lands in a tray above the prompt: whose words they are, the passage itself (with Show all for a long one), and a few follow-up questions written for that passage. Click a suggestion to ask it, or type your own. The quote goes with your message, so the reply is about those words.

You can quote a comment the same way, from the comment itself, and the tray says whose comment it was.

Dropstone's own highlights

Dropstone marks phrases in its replies with the same colours when something is the point of the answer: the figure that changed, the step that must not be skipped. It does the same in comments. You can select a marked phrase and quote it like any other text.

Formulas

A formula in a reply, a comment, or a highlight note is typeset. Select a formula and quote it, and it reads back as the LaTeX it was written in, so Dropstone can work with it.