How to navigate around TEXTAREA field in Safari?!

[NathanA]

Hey, everyone,

So, I was composing a post to the Macrumors forums using my brand-spanking-new iPhone 3G (this post here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/521067/), and ran into an extremely annoying problem. Surely there has to be an obvious answer to this that I'm just missing...

So, at one point during the post composition, because Safari by default "zooms in" really closely when a TEXTAREA has focus and I couldn't see my whole post side-to-side without scrolling back and forth, I tried doing a "pinch" in Safari in order to zoom out a bit. Except when I did this, I accidentally managed to shift focus to a different form input field. And when the focus shifted, the text in the TEXTAREA field scrolled all the way to the top of my post.

I tried to go back and continue my composition, but try as I might, I could find absolutely NO WAY to scroll DOWN in the actual text box! The rest of my post was below the bottom edge of the text box but when I tried to scroll in Safari, it scrolled through the web page and NOT the text box, so I could never get to the bottom of my post to finish it! I had to post it as it was and then get on my computer and edit/finish it from there.

SUPER ANNOYING.

It is pretty obvious how you change the position of the text cursor within a text box to any other part of the text that is VISIBLE. But how do you scroll WITHIN a text box to get your text cursor to a place in the text that is NOT visible?

Thanks to all in advance,

-- Nathan

 

[RobTuck]

I think im understanding you correctly, but to scroll in a text box, you just scroll as if you were scrolling any other part of the web page. I.e. drag in the box with your finger. You just need to be quick, or the magnifying glass will appear.

 

[NathanA]

Incorrect...but thanks for responding and trying to help! What you suggested I do was exactly what I was trying to do. The problem is that it scrolls the entire web page when you do that, not just the text field that you are in, even if your finger is inside the text field.

After much Googling, I managed to figure it out. You have to position your fingers in the text field with the keyboard dismissed, and use TWO fingers to scroll the text field. Not super-intuitive and not documented anywhere officially by Apple that I could find. Sigh. I also can't get it to work every time (success rate is about 50/50 for me).

I also happened to discover another method while playing around with the first which seems to work more reliably for me but which is also slow and obnoxious...you hold down your finger in the text field with the keyboard up until the magnifying glass comes up, and then ever-so-slowly move your finger to the end of the last visible line and then drag it down (if you want to go down...do the opposite if you want to scroll up of course). It will start scrolling down (or up) extremely slowly, but it will go.

-- Nathan