106 replies to this topic

[Grant Gochnauer]

Hello --

Have others found that working with bullet points is extremely tedius - especially when copying/pasting between notes? I've found so many times where I'll hit enter to go to the next bullet and it's just a blank spot instead of a bullet. I've also run into a situation where when I went to decrease the indent, the text moves to the left but there is no bullet.

Simplify formatting seems to have no effect.

This is on version 4.5.3 - public release.

The only way I've been able to get around this is to copy the note contents into another app like notepad, then select all in evernote and paste in the raw text and start applying bullets from scratch.

Thanks

[JMichael]

Yes, I have observed this behavior.

It seems to happen most often after pasting from a web page that has bullets.

[Grant Gochnauer]

Or perhaps forwarded content to Evernote's upload email address.

[lawvol]

This happens to me quite often as well.

[dlu]

Hmm, I have seen it once or twice when editing a web clip or something I pasted in from another program, but I haven't seen it with just the regular bullet points in Evernote. Could someone post or PM me some specific steps to reproduce?

[t-bird]

Yes! That happens to me all the time, it's really frustrating. And seems to have gotten worse in the last release. Half the time when I hit return to add another list item, the new line doesn't have a bullet but just a blank space. And sometimes it creates a paragraph break in the middle of the bullet list, which is impossible to fix without removing all formatting and starting over. I also find it very frustrating that bullet list hierarchies don't transfer from the Windows interface to the iPhone interface. If I have list organized how I want it in Windows, I don't dare open it for editing on the iPhone or it will strip most of the formatting. These issues are getting bad enough that I'm considering paying the money to use OneNote instead. OneNote has absolutely the best bullet functionality around. (Moving line items up and down by dragging is awesome.)

To me this is pretty bad considering the level of formatting options that other note taking applications have had for years. I love Evernote's syncing, but they are way behind in terms of interface. And now they've gone and moved the "Favorites" notebook to the bottom of the list in iPhone. (Are you kidding me?) They really need to get a User Experience team to work fixing these problems.

[Grant Gochnauer]

Hmm, I have seen it once or twice when editing a web clip or something I pasted in from another program, but I haven't seen it with just the regular bullet points in Evernote. Could someone post or PM me some specific steps to reproduce?

Hi,
It seems to happen just in regular day to day use of Evernote. In fact, it happens so often, I'm surprised that Evernote's employees haven't noticed it already. I'd guess that the majority of times it starts to happen when copying and pasting either between notes in evernote or from another application. If you stay within a single note and never copy anything into the note, it doesn't happen nearly as often but it still does happen.

What t-bird explained above happens to me as well. Is it helpful if I PM'd you an evernote export of a note when it starts happening again?

I appreciate the active engagement to get down to the root issue as it is definitely a very annoying issue - especially for those that use bullet points a lot

thanks!

[mrossk]

I agree to all writers before. I have exactly the same experiences. I have given up to paste text from other programs. I only do this over the extra step of pasting all text in notepad and then copying this notepad-text in evernote.

But even then the bullets are sometimes destroyed.

Today I have made an addition at the top of a bullet list in en android. This list i have created in en win.

After syncing it back to win the bullet-formatting at the top of the list was completely destroyed and I had again to go over notepad to be able to correct this.

[dlu]

I'll play around with copy/pasting of bullet points into and between various notes. If it happens again, pls PM me the steps involved to reproduce

[chriso]

This is frustrating for me too. I just use a simple indented bullet list (no cutting and pasting from external web pages) and I get this in the fat client (Havent tried the web version, although I expect its the same)

Its seems to happen when deleting more than one bullet point and indentation. Or cutting and pasting elsewhere in the bullet point list. You then get these gaps that you cant delete.

You can reproduce some of this behaviour by simply cutting and pasting some bullets (and indentations) from the bottom of the list to the very top. This doesnt create the annoying blank, but looses the bullet marker, even though it thinks its there. Then start to cut and paste around and you begin to get in an awful mess.

This is the show stopper for me at the moment.

C.

[dlu]

I suspect it has to do with the HTML of making bulleted lists. Copy/Paste between the <ul> or <ol> tags tends to wreak havoc on the rest of the note.

We've made some general progress that fixes some issues here and there. Will try to revisit it when we have time

[JMichael]

I suspect it has to do with the HTML of making bulleted lists. Copy/Paste between the <ul> or <ol> tags tends to wreak havoc on the rest of the note.

This is a well-known and understood problem.
The rule I belive is to convert the list type to the type you are pasting into.
So, if I copy several unordered lines (Bullet list) and paste into an ordered list (Numbered List), then the lines would be converted to ordered lines.

For an example of this see the Free Online HTML Editor.

Maybe this editor can be of some help to your Dev team.

[dlu]

I suspect it has to do with the HTML of making bulleted lists. Copy/Paste between the <ul> or <ol> tags tends to wreak havoc on the rest of the note.

This is a well-known and understood problem.
The rule I belive is to convert the list type to the type you are pasting into.
So, if I copy several unordered lines (Bullet list) and paste into an ordered list (Numbered List), then the lines would be converted to ordered lines.

For an example of this see the Free Online HTML Editor.

Maybe this editor can be of some help to your Dev team.

Thanks! Will send it along

[Grant Gochnauer]

This is frustrating for me too. I just use a simple indented bullet list (no cutting and pasting from external web pages) and I get this in the fat client (Havent tried the web version, although I expect its the same)

Its seems to happen when deleting more than one bullet point and indentation. Or cutting and pasting elsewhere in the bullet point list. You then get these gaps that you cant delete.

You can reproduce some of this behaviour by simply cutting and pasting some bullets (and indentations) from the bottom of the list to the very top. This doesnt create the annoying blank, but looses the bullet marker, even though it thinks its there. Then start to cut and paste around and you begin to get in an awful mess.

This is the show stopper for me at the moment.

C.

This is exactly it! It's like when copying/pasting bullet points around in the same document, highlighting some bullet points must be selecting more than intended from a back-end HTML storage perspective. In other words, even though I'm only intending to select the one <li> element, I'm selecting a parent <ol> as well and then when I copy/paste we get malformed HTML representing the content. At this point, the whole note has malformed HTML and you are pretty much stuck unless you remove all formatting in the note.

Extremely frustrating.

Thanks

[spg SCOTT]

I'll play around with copy/pasting of bullet points into and between various notes. If it happens again, pls PM me the steps involved to reproduce

I've just run into this...

I find that if the content of the bulleted line is from the clipboard, i.e pasted content, the list breaks.

A screenshot, and exported note to explain (I hope).
http://www.evernote....0a17a4721ace184



EN: 4.5.4.6170 (222832)

[dlu]

Will be looking into it. Thanks for the example. I think I have pretty clear idea. We have a heavy bullet point users in the office and I got a nice list of "things to improve on."

[Grant Gochnauer]

Will be looking into it. Thanks for the example. I think I have pretty clear idea. We have a heavy bullet point users in the office and I got a nice list of "things to improve on."

Thank you! We appreciate it. Looking forward to the improvements.
Grant

[spip72]

Hi,

I see you are already on it, but I still want to add that these issues with bullet lists and numbered lists is really getting to me to the degree that I consider simply stop using Evernote. I am a Project Manager, and lists are a very important part of my daily work. I see a lot of erratic behaviour with just editing the lists and moving items between lists within evernote. No copying/pasting from webpages. But you may also want to put more focus on copy/paste to/from Word/Powerpoint/Excel. This is not working very good.
Please please please put a lot more focus into this matter. In fact, this is much more important for me than adding new features for the moment.

Thanks!
Jakob

[Jimmy T]

To further elaborate on bullet issues:

My problems do not relate to copy and paste. They relate to normal usage.
Commonly, when I am three or four tabs deep, I cannot move the indent back to the left (remove a tab/shift-tab). The bullet will disappear and the text will remain at the same place. If I then shift-tab again, the text on that line itself will disappear.

If I hit backspace, the cursor will move to the end of the previous line. There is no way for me to move the indent to the left even with the indent move button (next to the bullets).

For a text example:

• This is fine
  
• And this is fine
  
• but then things start getting messed up
• Because I'll want to go back on the next bullet

[/list]

but instead this will happen

and I won't be able to get to the previous tab (the empty circle/donut)

and if I hit backspace as I'll pretend to do for the next line. <hypothetical next line>so here I am stuck with no way to create any bullets except ones at the same indent or an indent even farther to the right

So the point is I can't use tabs normally. My most common solutions are to copy and paste a start tab (which doesn't always work) or to cut and paste the whole thing into Word and fix the formatting then copy and paste it back (this results in other formatting problems, but solves this one. Annoying as heck).

I'd say this happens 1.5-2 times per hour of use.

[dlu]

To further elaborate on bullet issues:

My problems do not relate to copy and paste. They relate to normal usage.
Commonly, when I am three or four tabs deep, I cannot move the indent back to the left (remove a tab/shift-tab). The bullet will disappear and the text will remain at the same place. If I then shift-tab again, the text on that line itself will disappear.

If I hit backspace, the cursor will move to the end of the previous line. There is no way for me to move the indent to the left even with the indent move button (next to the bullets).

For a text example:

• This is fine
  
• And this is fine
  
• but then things start getting messed up
• Because I'll want to go back on the next bullet

[/list]

but instead this will happen

and I won't be able to get to the previous tab (the empty circle/donut)

and if I hit backspace as I'll pretend to do for the next line. <hypothetical next line>so here I am stuck with no way to create any bullets except ones at the same indent or an indent even farther to the right

So the point is I can't use tabs normally. My most common solutions are to copy and paste a start tab (which doesn't always work) or to cut and paste the whole thing into Word and fix the formatting then copy and paste it back (this results in other formatting problems, but solves this one. Annoying as heck).

I'd say this happens 1.5-2 times per hour of use.

Hmm, I gave this a quick try and couldn't reproduce it. I could tab in 10 levels deep and then tab back out all 10 levels without a problem.

Will keep an eye on it though, esp when we revisit bullet pointing