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(Archived) REQUEST: Cross-platform "stylesheets"


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Hey there,

I didn't find any posts which go into details on that, so I'd like to start this request more serious.

I'm quite new to Evernote (~1 year of little usage, and subscribed power user since two months now), and I'm using it currently on Windows and iPad. I'm very aware of the fact that EN is not supposed to be a word processor, and that's exactly why the following suggestion would IMO make a lot of sense.

The approaches on the two platforms I'm using regarding the typography are very different: iOS has some predefined styles ("Section", "Subsection", "Paragraph", "Blockquote") while the Windows version allows a lot of styling options (who needs that in that detail?).

I guess the fact that you can't chose the same styling in Windows like in iOS (in iOS a heading 1 is 20pt while in Win you can only chose 18 or 24pt) has been pointed very often out and should be fixed of course. But maybe there's a better option after all.

I would appreciate very much the standpoint that you do not want to style every note individually, but better want predefined paragraph styles like the iOS app has a glimpse of it. But, as user's tastes are individual it would be very nice to be able to define the style you use, similar to the web stylesheets (css). To make the content more independent from the styling, and that you don't have too many choices/options when writing something down, but still you can have your predefined sets of styles.

Ideally this should be solved once across all plattforms.

The main thoughts during working led to this suggestion:

  • I don't like Tahoma, and I don't want to change it in every note.

  • I just need basic heading1, heading2, paragraph and blockquote styles, but identical and quickly applicable on all platforms please.

  • self defined styles like e.g. the possibility to create a "code" parapgraph with monospaced fonts would be the cherry on top (of course other usertypes can think of other examples)

I think a step like that would underline Evernote's principles very well and make it more efficient and beautiful. Would you agree?

Thanks for listening,

Philipp

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  • Level 5*

Sure, that's a useful idea (modulo the problem that not all typefaces are available on all clients), variations on this have been proposed in the past. I think you'd also need to be wary of the fact that the same style doesn't always display as nicely on one client as it may on another -- you can see that to some degree with browsers (which is essentially what Evernote uses for display under the hood).

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  • Level 5*

Sure, that's a useful idea (modulo the problem that not all typefaces are available on all clients), variations on this have been proposed in the past. I think you'd also need to be wary of the fact that the same style doesn't always display as nicely on one client as it may on another -- you can see that to some degree with browsers (which is essentially what Evernote uses for display under the hood).

I like the idea of using CSS, and I think it has been proposed in the past, but I don't know how easy this would be to implement across all of the platforms. As for the typefaces, one could have them degrade gracefully to the one available on that platform (arial, helvetica, sans-serif), so I wouldn't be too concerned about that.

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  • Level 5*

External CSS isn't used in EN notes, as far as I can tell. All of the styling is done inline. See http://dev.evernote....apters/ENML.php. Not sure how big of a change it would be to implement, but across 14-odd clients (and the cloud), I'm guessing it wouldn't be trivial.

I imagine the developers are quite familiar with the concept of CSS, and rejected it for a reason. They might revisit the decision. Who knows? But, as you said, it probably wouldn't be a change that they could make lightly. At this point, I wonder if the costs would justify the benefits.

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Thanks for your feedback.

Of course I'm depicting a big picture in the first post, taking into account the long term development and the tendency for more and more professional, beautiful and easy to use applications.

For now I would be totally satisfied when the Windows Client would have the same four style presets as the iOS app. (instead of all fonts and almost all sizes (except the ones we'd need for consistency ;))

Also the reference to the stylesheet principle was only made to make the idea more clear, and not a suggestion how to implement it technically. That's quite out of my range :)

By the way GrumpyMonkey, your article about non organized organization was my kickoff for using Evernote intensely - thanks a lot for the inspiration!

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  • Level 5*

Thanks for your feedback.

Of course I'm depicting a big picture in the first post, taking into account the long term development and the tendency for more and more professional, beautiful and easy to use applications.

For now I would be totally satisfied when the Windows Client would have the same four style presets as the iOS app. (instead of all fonts and almost all sizes (except the ones we'd need for consistency ;))

Also the reference to the stylesheet principle was only made to make the idea more clear, and not a suggestion how to implement it technically. That's quite out of my range :)

By the way GrumpyMonkey, your article about non organized organization was my kickoff for using Evernote intensely - thanks a lot for the inspiration!

I'm glad my article helped :) Thanks for the kind words!

And, as an early adopter of CSS (I was a web designer in my previous career) I certainly have an affinity for it. Your point about drawing a big picture is well-taken, and better consistency across platforms would be nice, whatever the ultimate solution ends up being.

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  • 1 year later...

Worrying about fonts completely misses the point of style sheets. You don't need to worry about it on the client, because that's up to the user to set 'per device'. All EverNote needs to worry about from a core level, is correctly tagging the markup.

 

- Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Code, Sub Heading 1, Sub Heading 2, etc.

 

You then set some sane defaults for each platform and allow the user to customise. To make it simple the first time around, you could even restrict each note to either stylesheets OR using inline formats. This is actually a good thing, as I hate having clean markup contaminated with single-use formatting.

 

Another side effect, is that it cleans up the mess of trying to make content look identical across devices and platforms. Here's a hint. If I want something to look identical, I'll use PDF, not EverNote.

 

I want things to look consistent... and that's a different thing entirely.

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