(Archived) Hidden formatting?

[mogf01 12]

Hi, I'm new to Evernote, so this might be a stupid question (I have done some searching, but...).

My problem is that when I copy notes from web pages, I cannot edit all the formatting in the notes after they have been added to Evernote. It seems to me Evernote is trying to keep the html formatting somehow, and that this formatting is hidden from me. The result is that I have very ugly notes (some of the time) that I cannot fix the formatting for. I've tried several ways to reformat text, but nothing seems to help...

This is very annoying, and if this is the normal behavior I'll most probably not use Evernote since I don't want to use a notes taking tool that don't allow me to change/clean-up formatting for notes I copy from a browser.

Any tips/help is appreciated.

[gazumped 11,665]

Do you cut and paste from the web page, or use the Evernote clipper? And are you importing / pasting into the desktop client or the web application?

One easy way to simplify some/ most formatting is to Edit/Select All in the note, then right-click on the selection and choose "simplify formatting" - you may find it easier to edit afterward.

Pages containing pictures, tables or columns tend to be more complicated - you can look for the "print version" of many busier pages to get (mainly) plain text which is easier to manipulate. Some print version pages actually do try to print the content when you click the link (how rude!) so make sure your printer is turned off..

Some pages with other bells and whistles like Flash seem to be problematic - you can copy some or all of these pages as JPGs with various applications like Screengrab! (Firefox add-in) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... creengrab/

Of course the text content is not editable, but you can often copy several chunks of relevant content from different parts of the page.

Copying a web page to PDF is also easy with add-ins (and if you have a PDF printer installed - just print the page), which can then be OCR'd and manipulated; or you can cut and paste your chosen content into a word processor which will often give you more visibility and control over random html formatting.

If you're solely concerned with text content, you could cut and paste into Notepad, or your text-editor of choice, which will destroy the formatting. Simply copy and paste (again) into evernote, or import the note file directly.

[mogf01 12]

Thanks for the answers. I've got it to work now, mostly using "Simplify Formatting". Interesting fact about that: when I select "Simplify Formatting", I also need to edit the note in some way. If I don't do that before switching to some other note, the "Simplify Formatting" will be gone when I return to the note. Not very intuitive, but...