Notes rearrange with lots of spaces.

[Phyllis greenwald 1]

I dont know the technical name for this but when I open a previous perfectly formatted note the note has rearranged itself with lots of spaces between words and lines. Sometimes just 1 word per line. Has this happened to anyone else and is there an easy fix?

My notes are also duplicating themselves.

 

 

[gazumped 11,741]

Hi.  How and on what device are you creating these perfectly formatted notes,  and is the formatting still broken when you look at them again on the same device?

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,981]

More information about devices used would be helpful. I think the extra spaces and duplicate notes are probably 2 separate issues.

But the extra spaces you describe sometimes occur when content in a note is inside an "HTML box" and is made editable. Material from an email or clipped or copied and pasted from a Website can sometimes be contained inside a gray box, where it is visible and properly formatted, but cannot be edited. If you click on the top line of the gray box, an icon of a "magic wand" will pop up, and if you click that, all the content in the box will be made editable. But sometimes, depending on the underlying formatting of the original HTML, weird amounts of extra spaces will show up. Is it possible that this is the origin of the spaces?

The way I fix that is to copy a length of the spaces to the clipboard, open Find and Replace (Ctrl+H), and paste the blank space in the Find box. (Sounds weird, but it works.) Then I put just a single space in the Replace box and click Replace All. The spacing between words then becomes normal. Of course, there are sometimes different lengths of extra spacing, which requires repeating the process. All in all, it's a pain, but it might be worth trying.

[PinkElephant 8,243]

For me it is not clear what is meant by „perfectly formatted“.

There are different way of formatting, the legacy client can be used, the v10 client, there are different elements etc.

If the formatting is altered, I would check if the content is altered as well.

And in general (and if on a subscription) I would contact support about it.

[Brother Tobias 9]

Almost every note I open in v10 (October 2022) has reformatted the text in this way, with blocks of six spaces added in every line. I have thousands of notes, and doing a search and replace on each one of them is out of the question. 

[gazumped 11,741]

7 minutes ago, Brother Tobias said:

Almost every note I open in v10 (October 2022) has reformatted the text in this way, with blocks of six spaces added in every line. I have thousands of notes, and doing a search and replace on each one of them is out of the question. 

Could you show us a screenshot of an example (short) note that has been affected in this way,  both as it now is,  and after you have reformatted it back to its original state?  I'm not clear what's happening here - Evernote has been adding and removing line breaks and padding spaces,  partly (I guess) because they now need to reformat everything into the current font and apply the necessary "wrapper" coding.  I've been combatting that where necessary with 'simplify formatting' and some strategic deletions,  but it hasn't affected my notes as badly.  It's definitely worth feeding this back to the Support team too!

[Brother Tobias 9]

I don't have the time at present to deal with screenshots and such (also some of the content is confidential). I think you are correct that this is a need of the new version to change formatting. But the issue is the need for reformatting: If a program designed to maintain information can't preserve formatting (which is often part of the information's utility!) then it is of no use to me. I will keep using the legacy version for as long as I can. (And yes, I also don't like the new default font, and the inability to preserve fonts is an additional serious problem!)

[agsteele 2,964]

I get this issue when I insert text from an HTML formatted Email.  The issue arises because of the formatting of the original message which doesn't import well into the note.  I can overcome it by copying using paste and match style (Ctrl+Shift+V).  Of course I then lose the original formatting.  I can also run a search and replace for six spaces and replace with one space or a carriage return - whatever is most useful.  I could have a shortcut set up in AutoHotkey which would do that upon demand.

[Brother Tobias 9]

Thanks. I'm aware there are workarounds such as using search and replace to remove the added padding. But as I say, with thousands of notes going back to (IIRC) version 4 of Evernote, it is too much to have to run search and replace on all of them. Especially when many of them are emails imported effortlessly using the direct evernote account email address. It makes the feature far less useful by adding additional steps, to say nothing of my already large archive of email in evernote. After all, the point of computers is that they should do work for one, not create more work for one to do. It's too bad that in version 10 the designers didn't stick closer to the formatting system of the older version.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,981]

It does sound like emails may be the basic problem: if they have HTML formatting, Evernote does for whatever reason often reformat them in ways that include spaces. If they show up inside a gray "HTML box," then I don't think the reformatting is as likely to occur; but making the material editable often does make a big mess. If bringing in emails is a primary part of one's EN use (as it is for a lot of people), I can see how this could become really problematic.

Someone mentioned an approach to importing notes from another service, which also required some reformatting, in which one only reformats the note that one needs to deal with at the moment. All the thousands of others can be allowed to rest in their messiness without wasting time on them. I realize that that is not how I would want to approach something myself--I would want to fix them all--but it might be most workable for now.

As was suggested, though, this is definitely something worth reporting to EN support, at least so they're aware of how problematic it is, whether or not they can offer any useful suggestions: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/requests/new.

[agsteele 2,964]

5 hours ago, Brother Tobias said:

Especially when many of them are emails imported effortlessly using the direct evernote account email address

That's the situation in which I experience the issue. I wouldn't bother to change anything for notes gone by until you need to access a note. An AHK script will just do everything in the blink of an eye.

[Brother Tobias 9]

On 10/7/2022 at 12:25 PM, Brother Tobias said:

Thanks. I'm aware there are workarounds such as using search and replace to remove the added padding. But as I say, with thousands of notes going back to (IIRC) version 4 of Evernote, it is too much to have to run search and replace on all of them. Especially when many of them are emails imported effortlessly using the direct evernote account email address. It makes the feature far less useful by adding additional steps, to say nothing of my already large archive of email in evernote. After all, the point of computers is that they should do work for one, not create more work for one to do. It's too bad that in version 10 the designers didn't stick closer to the formatting system of the older version.

I'm back now over a year later and this problem still has not been addressed. Email import used to work fine in the legacy version, but version 10+ continues to insert blocks of spaces. The lack of global search and replace over multiple documents makes for no easy post import solution. I would dearly love to see this issue addressed with the seriousness it deserves.

[PinkElephant 8,243]

I import emails frequently, but I don't see anything like this.

If this happens with emails, the most likely explanation is that this are HTML mails (holding hidden formatting). HTML is not completely standardized. It can be that embedded formatting commands are interpreted differently by different programs.

You can try to view the email in it's HTML version to see if there are really spaces, or if there are HTML formatting elements where the spaces appear.

[Brother Tobias 9]

13 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

I import emails frequently, but I don't see anything like this.

If this happens with emails, the most likely explanation is that this are HTML mails (holding hidden formatting). HTML is not completely standardized. It can be that embedded formatting commands are interpreted differently by different programs.

You can try to view the email in it's HTML version to see if there are really spaces, or if there are HTML formatting elements where the spaces appear.

It appears the HTML formatting may be the problem. My issue is that it wasn't a problem before version 10. I don't know what changed in Evernote to no longer be able to parse HTML properly, but that appears to be the source of the change. I've logged a feedback issue.