I think the UnifiedHighlighter should be the first highlighter that a new user of Lucene should look at. The Lucene highlighter module overview.html has merely a sentence about the entire package. It could list the highlighters in order of recommendation, and then we update javadocs on our highlighters to offer more comparative information. BTW, Solr has this page comparing the highlighters, which have pros/cons that mostly match to Lucene: https://solr.apache.org/guide/solr/latest/query-guide/highlighting.html#choosing-a-highlighter
FastVectorHighlighter has an alluring name. Gosh, sounds like a great highlighter -- right? :-) I propose deprecating it for removal. We don't have to be quick on its actual removal... let users express concerns. If there's a lingering benefit to this highlighter, deprecation could galvanize momentum to address those feature/improvement gaps to the UnifiedHighlighter. The original Highlighter is called "Highlighter" because it came first, and I suspect most Lucene users start there based on the name. I'm not sure about deprecating it. But I would like to propose renaming it to OriginalHighlighter for Lucene 11. WDYT? ~ David Smiley Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley
