http://wordsmith.org/board/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=16...=0&page=0#Post163208

Any further input most welcome--thanks, guys

I consider it most interesting that these 2 sites are communicating, so to speak...

I have often heard "painting" used in these circumstances, and I am definitely not computer savvy at all. I remember one of my very early posts here on the subject of being computer savvy.

I've only seen the phrase used in this sense by shu, but it is quite self-explanatory (to me, anyway; I can't answer for a complete computer newbie).

Googling in "exact phrase box, "paint the words" and in "at least one" box, "PC computer" yields 283 hits

"paint the text" gives over 10,000 ghits.

nerd: Good one

I've never tried using the term "paint" for this action. I'll try it and see if my customers catch on more quickly or not.

Paint seems a bit misleading in some situations. Double-clicking on a word, selects it. I've always found this to be less error-prone than trying to paint the word from left to right. In some applications, triple-clicking on a word, selects the line of text that the word is in. There are also other ways to select more than a single word in some instances. With the cursor placed to the left of a word, one can hold down the shift key, and press the right arrow. This can be done for as long as you desire, selecting a character at a time. Also, shift-control-right arrow, selects a word or so at a time.

And, if you think about it, painting is not an apt metaphor for what is happening. If I paint over something it is obscured from view and it remains that way, whereas selecting text in a word processor, is a transitory action. What happens when a user selects text, is that the white pixels and the black pixels exchange colors in the area of a bounding box around the word or text, only for so long as the text remains selected. This process is called xor (for exclusive or), a term from logic.