(Archived) BUG: Changing font size

[Julian 40]

I'll probably file a bug on this but, before I do, I thought I'd check that I haven't simply missed something.

My issue is regarding interoperability between Evernote on iOS and on Windows 7. I tend to format the majority of my notes into sections and subsections so that I can get more stuff into a single note and, as far as I can see, it is literally impossible to do this with consistent formatting when using both an iOS device and the Windows dsktop client to create formatted notes.

The issue is that specifying a font size in terms of an exact point size is not supported on iOS so one has to create a subsection title in bigger bold text by formatting it as a "subsection" (as opposed to a "section" or a "paragraph") using the menu one gets when tapping the Evernote backwards-P icon in note editing mode. This does create a bigger emboldened subsection title but when the note is then synced back to Evernote and I subsequently look at it on my WIndows desktop Evernote client I see that the "subsection" formatting used by the iOS client is Tahoma bold 15-point. What's the big deal? Surely all I do is to ensure that any notes that I create on my desktop also use Tahoma bold 15-point for subsection titles? That's where the rather comical issue comes in. Pretty much the one point size in Tahoma that the Evernote Windows desktop client doesn't allow me to use for formatting my notes is, you guessed it, Tahoma 15-point! It goes from 14 to 16; I've tried highlighting the point-size box and explicitly typing in "15" but that box isn't editable.

Unless I've missed something then the consequence of the above is that it is impossible for me to use consistent formatting between notes created on my iPad and my desktop and will end up with all iPad notes using 15-point for subheadings whereas anything I create on my desktop will need to use either 14-point or 16-point. OK, I realise that this isn't the biggest issue in the world, and possibly only someone with my eye for detail would find it annoying, but it does seem a bit of a silly oversight that really should be fixed.

There are two obvious ways to fix it that I can see. The simplest would be to add 15-point as an option for the Tahoma font size on the Windows client but I would suggest that the better solution would be to add some options to the settings for the Evernote iOS client whereby the user could select the font sizes to be used for the predefined "section", "subsection" and "paragraph" formatting options. This probably isn't so much of an issue for the iPad but for the iPhone (and Android/Blackberry - basically anything with limited screen real estate) it is useful to be able to be as space-efficient as possible when formatting notes and during my past experiments with using Evernote I found that using bolded 12-point for my subsection headings was perfectly good enough to make them visible so for me having subsections in 15-point is wasteful of screen real estate when viewing the notes on an iPhone hence, apart from fixing my issue with consistency of formatting between mobile and desktop devices, this latter solution would also allow me to format better for my mobile devices.

By the way, I know that there are some more messy workarounds such as revisiting all notes created on iOS in my desktop client once they've been synced and go through them all to highlight section and subsection headers and re-format them on my desktop, probably to 12-point bold for subsections and 14-point bold for sections, but that seems to defeat the purpose of adding rich text formatting to the iOS clients in the first place and would be a chore that could be avoided if formatting could be done satisfactorily at the point of entry on iOS.

This is rather a long post about quite a trivial matter but the devil is in the detail and it does seem like a bit of a silly situation that should be fixed. Please let me know if I've missed something really obvious that would allow me to create notes on my iOS device and my desktop client that have consistent formatting for subsections but from what I can see some sort of code change, either in the iOS or the Windows client, is required or else I need to revert to the messy work-around above.

- Julian

P.S. The same issue might also be there for section formatting as well but I haven't tried that yet since I mostly only use subsections (for the aforementioned reason of wanting to minimise screen real estate when viewing notes on my iPhone)

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I'll probably file a bug on this but, before I do, I thought I'd check that I haven't simply missed something.

My issue is regarding interoperability between Evernote on iOS and on Windows 7. I tend to format the majority of my notes into sections and subsections so that I can get more stuff into a single note and, as far as I can see, it is literally impossible to do this with consistent formatting when using both an iOS device and the Windows dsktop client to create formatted notes.

The issue is that specifying a font size in terms of an exact point size is not supported on iOS so one has to create a subsection title in bigger bold text by formatting it as a "subsection" (as opposed to a "section" or a "paragraph") using the menu one gets when tapping the Evernote backwards-P icon in note editing mode. This does create a bigger emboldened subsection title but when the note is then synced back to Evernote and I subsequently look at it on my WIndows desktop Evernote client I see that the "subsection" formatting used by the iOS client is Tahoma bold 15-point. What's the big deal? Surely all I do is to ensure that any notes that I create on my desktop also use Tahoma bold 15-point for subsection titles? That's where the rather comical issue comes in. Pretty much the one point size in Tahoma that the Evernote Windows desktop client doesn't allow me to use for formatting my notes is, you guessed it, Tahoma 15-point! It goes from 14 to 16; I've tried highlighting the point-size box and explicitly typing in "15" but that box isn't editable.

Unless I've missed something then the consequence of the above is that it is impossible for me to use consistent formatting between notes created on my iPad and my desktop and will end up with all iPad notes using 15-point for subheadings whereas anything I create on my desktop will need to use either 14-point or 16-point. OK, I realise that this isn't the biggest issue in the world, and possibly only someone with my eye for detail would find it annoying, but it does seem a bit of a silly oversight that really should be fixed.

There are two obvious ways to fix it that I can see. The simplest would be to add 15-point as an option for the Tahoma font size on the Windows client but I would suggest that the better solution would be to add some options to the settings for the Evernote iOS client whereby the user could select the font sizes to be used for the predefined "section", "subsection" and "paragraph" formatting options. This probably isn't so much of an issue for the iPad but for the iPhone (and Android/Blackberry - basically anything with limited screen real estate) it is useful to be able to be as space-efficient as possible when formatting notes and during my past experiments with using Evernote I found that using bolded 12-point for my subsection headings was perfectly good enough to make them visible so for me having subsections in 15-point is wasteful of screen real estate when viewing the notes on an iPhone hence, apart from fixing my issue with consistency of formatting between mobile and desktop devices, this latter solution would also allow me to format better for my mobile devices.

By the way, I know that there are some more messy workarounds such as revisiting all notes created on iOS in my desktop client once they've been synced and go through them all to highlight section and subsection headers and re-format them on my desktop, probably to 12-point bold for subsections and 14-point bold for sections, but that seems to defeat the purpose of adding rich text formatting to the iOS clients in the first place and would be a chore that could be avoided if formatting could be done satisfactorily at the point of entry on iOS.

This is rather a long post about quite a trivial matter but the devil is in the detail and it does seem like a bit of a silly situation that should be fixed. Please let me know if I've missed something really obvious that would allow me to create notes on my iOS device and my desktop client that have consistent formatting for subsections but from what I can see some sort of code change, either in the iOS or the Windows client, is required or else I need to revert to the messy work-around above.

- Julian

P.S. The same issue might also be there for section formatting as well but I haven't tried that yet since I mostly only use subsections (for the aforementioned reason of wanting to minimise screen real estate when viewing notes on my iPhone)

hi. i can't speak to the specific issue you mentioned (different platforms not playing well together in terms of formatting), but more generally, there are formatting anomalies in Evernote, even when working on a single platform. in my case, it occurs on my mac. i try and report the issues whenever they occur, and hopefully this will help the evernote developers track down the issues. i think at this point, it is best to think of the formatting as an option, but not something in which to invest too much time.

as a specific example, i often see mysterious empty line insertions before and after text i am editing, and fonts occasionally morph into other ones as i am typing. i had to prepare something last night for a meeting (all plain text, by the way, with no formatting), and rather than spend my time struggling with this gremlin (even after stripping the formatting and copy/paste with formatmatch (like running everything through notepad in windows) i just cleaned it up in another program and then when i was done, made a new note and pasted it in. this unfailingly rids the text of the gremlin.

going forward, of course evernote will continue to improve, but one thing you may want to consider is adjusting your workflow to use shorter notes. this might mean using note links as well. i should add here that most apps have quirks, even microsoft word. in this case, evernote is dealing with multiple platforms, so i bet it is a more difficult process to track down bugs. i do hope you will submit a support ticket to help them out