Highlighting problem--shifting words that are highlighted

[sgardner7]

When I highlight scriptures using my desktop, I find that there is a problem when I go to my mobile device (iPhone 6 or iPad mini 4). The highlighting is shifted one word or one character to the left. And, it doesn't occur with every highlight--but most of them. Is there any way to correct that?
Steve

[sbradshaw]

This is a known bug in the "old experience" content pages on LDS.org. If you use the newer content pages under Study.LDS.org, the highlights between the website and the app should line up.

[sgardner7]

I am on New Experience and I see the shift on my desktop highlighting. It may be from the highlights I did before The New Experience. That must be why some highlights are correct. They were done while in the New Experience. Any suggestions to get the older highlights to shift back to where I had them in the Old Experience?

[sbradshaw]

There's no way to shift them back in bulk, unfortunately. You'll have to edit each one.

[sgardner7]

So...all the folks who had highlights on scriptures during the "old experience" have to manually adjust hundreds of highlights when they switched to the "new experience?"

[sbradshaw]

Each paragraph of content has a paragraph ID. A highlight is stored in the database with a start point (paragraph ID and word offset) and and end point (paragraph ID and word offset). The word offset is calculated by counting the words in the paragraph. For example, in "I, Nephi, having been ᵃborn of ᵇgoodly ᶜparents," [Nephi] is word 2, and [born] is word 5. Supposing that the verse is paragraph 1, and I wanted to highlight [Nephi ... born], the highlight would be stored in the database as starting at paragraph 1, word 2, and ending at paragraph 1, word 5. This is how Gospel Library for iOS, Android, and Windows have calculated word offsets for several years, and the new experience on LDS.org follows the same pattern.

The old experience on LDS.org, on the other hand, had a bug where it would count the words differently depending on whether or not the footnotes were visible (it counted footnote letters as their own words). For example, if footnotes were visible: "I, Nephi, having been ᵃborn of ᵇgoodly ᶜparents," – the old experience considered [Nephi] to be word 2, and [born] to be word 6. So the highlight was stored in the database as being from words 2 through 6, instead of words 2 through 5. This would cause problems when syncing with Gospel Library, because if you created a highlight on the online study tools, it would be misaligned in Gospel Library, and vice versa.

All highlights created in Gospel Library the past several years are "correct," and all highlights created in the old experience at LDS.org are "incorrect." However, looking at the database where highlights are stored, there's no way to know which highlights were created in Gospel Library and which ones were created in the old experience. Furthermore, it's impossible to know which ones may have already been corrected by the user. Therefore, there's no way to fix old experience highlights without causing all of the other highlights (which were created in Gospel Library) to suddenly become misaligned in the other direction.

Because the old study experience at LDS.org was not maintained very well, it caused permanent problems for users' annotations. I'm glad that we're finally at a point where it will soon be retired in favor of a new experience that aligns with the other platforms. And I hope that the next time there's a similar bug, it will be caught and fixed before it becomes a permanent problem.

I know that doesn't fix your misaligned highlights, but I hope the explanation helps you understand why it can't easily be fixed.

[sgardner7]

Great explanation!! I had just spent the last year going through all the Standard Works transferring the highlights to the digital scriptures. Ouch! Poor transition to the New Experience. Thanks for taking the time!