(Archived) Awesome app, shame about the text editor

[paulboag 0]

Hi Guys,

first let me say Evernote is awesome. Truly awesome. If it stayed exactly as it is today I would be happy however I wanted to make some suggestions. Please, please don't take this as negative criticisms. It is not meant that way.

From my perspective the big weakness of the mac app at the moment is the text editing functionality. Although it does the basics it does have some problems. Whether it is just me or whether it is a broader problem but I find the editor buggy to say the least. Formatting is often changed, fonts randomly alter and if I make something bold or italic I cannot change it back. You are also missing basic features like...

1. Links

2. Headings, sub headings etc

3. Bullets

4. Tables

I recognise that building a text editor cannot be easier but are there not any off the shelf solutions you could just plugin? Would it be possible just to plug a wysiwyg HTML editor in. That would do nicely.

Okay, I will stop now. I am just demonstrating my ignorance of application development. Keep up the good work and dont let us nit pickers get you down. Just wanted to make sure you knew what I wanted so you can put all your efforts into designing the world around me and my needs

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I agree with Jeff. If I need something in a special format, I'll use an app that's designed to do that. EN's strengths include the ability to capture data from a variety of sources & distribute the data to a variety of platforms.

As far as message boards go, most (all?) of them are "canned", so EN devs aren't the ones doing the coding.

[caffeineoverload 3]

I am using s combination of evernote and pearnote to take lecture notes is my college courses. There are 2 things that I need evernote to do better.

1) outlining capabilities

2) an ability to set the line spacing. For example the text in this forum is well spaced and easy to read. The same text in evernote has the lines placed closer together and makes it hard to read. This is something that Pearnote does very well even with its limited text editing capabilities.

[Scooter 11]

I think the text editor is fantastic, except... Double space? Bullets and such are nice, but Evernote IS my default text editor. I need the basics.

[falcon31 0]

FWIW, the editor isn't poor only on the Mac -- inconsistent and frustrating on the Windows client as well. (Worked fine in version 3.x.)

There were many problems in 3.5; I can't speak for 3.1, since I only used it for a short time.

I never used 3.5. 3.1.x was my choice because I depend on the portability. Dependable, portable -- better.

[jefito 5,598]

FWIW, the editor isn't poor only on the Mac -- inconsistent and frustrating on the Windows client as well. (Worked fine in version 3.x.)

There were many problems in 3.5; I can't speak for 3.1, since I only used it for a short time.

[falcon31 0]

FWIW, the editor isn't poor only on the Mac -- inconsistent and frustrating on the Windows client as well. (Worked fine in version 3.x.)

[zconger 0]

I am excited to hear that Evernote is planning to make the text editor less bad. I love Evernote, but on the Mac at least, the editor is infuriating. Here are some thing I would like to see:

* If I select some text and hit Command-V to paste over it, the selected text should be deleted and the pasted content should be added in the same place. Today, when I hit paste, the selected text is deleted, the pasted text is not added, and the cursor loses focus so it's hard to find my place in the text string again.

* If I move the cursor up and down through a document, the cursor should stay in roughly the same column as I go up and down. Today, it bounces seemingly at random from the first column of one line to the last column of the next line, and back, and forth. It is confusing. I have never seen a text editor act that way.

* There should be a text-only formatting option. Or strip all formatting. Most of what I do is text based, and all of the random formatting copied in from whatever document I copied the text from makes it even more difficult to work with the text. I don't know what "simplify formatting" is supposed to do, but instead of making the formatting simple, it just makes it different, but still hard to work with.

Someone else mentioned that if you could just make the text editor in Evernote as predictable as the text editor in the Evernote Forum, that would be awesome. I agree!

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Thanks, we're planning on enhancing the text editors on all of our platforms, including the Mac. Things like support for bulleted/numbered lists are high on our "list" of priorities ... our first attempts at this had lots of bad side effects when they interacted with other features like To-Do lists, so we needed to spend a little more time rather than just slap them into the UI.

This is welcome news.

Dave's post is over 2 1/2 years ago. Although it may be welcome, it's probably not correctly classified as "news."

[japbartlett 1]

Thanks, we're planning on enhancing the text editors on all of our platforms, including the Mac. Things like support for bulleted/numbered lists are high on our "list" of priorities ... our first attempts at this had lots of bad side effects when they interacted with other features like To-Do lists, so we needed to spend a little more time rather than just slap them into the UI.

Thanks

I understand you have priorities and you have provided some great updates, but it is no use to me just pasting content if I cannot makes notes about this content. Additionally the strength of EverNote is its ability to combine a number of functions. I suggest an easy way to overcome these shortfalls is to support TextEdit from SmileSoftware, I use it in most of my other apps on the Mac and IOS.

Cheers

[brewster1134 0]

i just wish i could clear the formatting like in gmail. simple formatting, and even pasting without formatting has strange behavior. (underlines that wont go away, no changes when selecting a different font, etc.) i have been having to copy into textedit and paste back in for raw text. all i need is bold, italic, and bullets, but it cant even handle that smoothly.

[jefito 5,598]

My opinion is that Evernote is fine for light editing, and it's pretty good at failthfully capturing web pages and other rich-text sources, but I don't think that it's intended to be a full-throttle word processor, at least at this time, and I find no irony that the forum's editing capabilities are better in some ways then Evernote's. Evernote's primary strengths lean more towards note capture, storage and retrieval.

[RobLewis 26]

I'll put in a request for another very basic editing feature: Variable line spacing. When I clip a web page then try to add my own text notes, it seems I'm stuck with whatever line spacing the document started out with. I can change the font size, but not the line spacing. This is very annoying.

Speaking of adding text notes, I'd like to repeat my request for clipped pages to have a couple of blank lines prepended to them, to give me a space to add explanatory notes/comments.

Also, the Mac standard for "paste without formatting" is Cmd-Opt-Shift-V, not Evernote's current Cmd-Shift-V (see, for example, Apple Mail and OmniOutliner). How about conforming?

[Metrodon 2,188]

You didn't leave your home number - how should they get in touch with you?

Try pasting without formatting - shift+cmd+v

This will simplify your text and strip any meta-data. Then you can format it any way you like.

I agree that the Editor is basic, but then again they are trying to support multiple devices, cloud syncing, plus a ton of other things - I guess we just have to be patient and know that they will fix things as and when the resources become available.

[goldsounds 0]

Unbelievably, this is still a problem in April 2011.

Evernote, please fix the buggy editor. Pasting bold text from other applications means that the formatting cannot be changed or removed. Fonts randomly change. Selecting a bunch of text with variable fonts and then attempting to change the font to something consistent doesn't do anything.

It seems to me that this is a pretty essential feature of an app where I'm going to be pasting text from all over the web and other applications. Without the ability to reformat the text so that it's consistent I'm left with a confusing mess.

Please let me know if/when you will be revisiting the buggy editor on OS X so that I can use your otherwise-awesome app with confidence!

Thanks,

Dan

[leahhalpert 0]

I've also found that once I apply bold or italics to segment of text, I can't remove it. I love this application, but, as a student using EverNote for my note taking, bold and italics are absolutely necessary. This would be a perfect app for my needs if these formatting issues were resolved

[Amafortas 0]

I would just like to add my vote for the floating textboxes for the Mac version. And the "Scribble function" mentioned by Carl_C. These would be VERY useful.

[engberg 89]

Thanks, we're planning on enhancing the text editors on all of our platforms, including the Mac. Things like support for bulleted/numbered lists are high on our "list" of priorities ... our first attempts at this had lots of bad side effects when they interacted with other features like To-Do lists, so we needed to spend a little more time rather than just slap them into the UI.

Thanks

[carl_c 0]

In addition to the things that Paul mentions, I would vote for:

• 
  [*:2ahtyuvu]Floating text boxes... In EverNote 3.0 (as with EN2.x) you cannot float text over images or any other part of the document. If I take a picture of a white board, for example, I may want to add a few additional notes on the image where they would make the most sense. Since I can't drop a text box in the foreground, I have to insert text and then everything else in the note tends to shift around on me.
  [*:2ahtyuvu]A scribble tool for notes, similar to what you have in the EN clipper. It would be nice to be able to add scribbles over images after they are in my notebook. Additionally, it would be nice if the scribble tool also had a text box option... am I getting greedy now?
  

-Carl