I don't want to use the device's native text selecting ability, rather I want to replace it with my own method. How can I select text across multiple elements based off of coordinate positions on the page?

Basically, I have the results of Touch clientX/clientYs to make a rectangular area and I want to select all the text contained in that area

I've tried using absolutely-positioned elements and creating a range with those elements as the bounding start and end but it did not work.