(Archived) Full-fledged text editor

[Dwinge 0]

I do a lot of my chemistry notetaking with Evernote and it's very frustrating to not be able to properly write equations with built-in superscript and subscript. Please include a full-fledged text editor much like your forum page!

[Wern 246]

Hi and welcome to the forums !

EN aims to let you organize all kinds of information and retrieving it fast. It does not try to be a "full fledged" text editor.

EN also needs to be compatible over many platforms and that makes it difficult.

As for subscript and superscript: It is available on the Web client.

Wern

[Text Editor Matters 1]

Agree 100%.....I use Evernote dozens of times a day to guess what.....TAKE NOTES......and you can barley format a note with bullets and separation and go back to edit....IT IS A NIGHTMARE.

 

I've been crazy patient as I love the concept and the greater ability to move between devices seamlessly  but the EDITOR STILL BLOWS.

 

How is that possible after some many requests and so many years......what is so magical about just getting your BASE FUNCTIONALITY to WORK?

[Text Editor Matters 1]

Are putting in bullets and then being able to move them and make sub bullets so complicated.....there are SOOOOO many bugs.....if just the functionality you provided worked correctly I'd be 80% satisfied.

 

By the way 100's of applications have sorted getting editors to work on IOS, Android, HTML and the like.....why can't Evernote make an effort?......seems it has not improved or changed in 18 mos. or more.

[megsaint 441]

How is that possible after some many requests and so many years......what is so magical about just getting your BASE FUNCTIONALITY to WORK?

According to Evernote, note takin is not its base or core functionality. It is, rather designed for storage and retrieval of all sorts of information. Text editing is more of a bonus feature. There are lots of excellent text editors out there. Perhaps you should be looking at one of them.

Best of luck.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Evernote does have "note" in its name, and I think there is no escaping the expectation by users that Evernote perform as a "note-taking" app. Evernote even describes the "note taking" experience in their literature on the product, and the "distraction-free editing," so I am guessing that even some copywriters at Evernote think of it as a note-taking app, though they probably lean towards thinking of it as a way to "store" text. In my opinion, support for markdown would greatly alleviate the formatting concerns, but I don't see that coming, and I think we all know that the indents / bullets / numbered lists have issues at the moment. 

 

Are these issues easily solved by developers, and they are just lazy? I doubt it, or the developers surely would have done it by now if they could have. My guess is that there are technical obstacles that will take a while to work through.

 

Is it a nightmare for me? Not in the slightest. I am actually pretty happy with the editor, especially now that we have plain text conversion on Mac and iOS. Personally, I take all of my notes in plain text using markdown. When I want to see it in all of its formatted beauty, I copy/paste into a markdown-compatible editor. I wouldn't be surprised if one of our many third-party integrations handles this more efficiently. I just haven't experimented with them. Another option would, of course, be to create a complex (but empty) outline ahead of time as a template. This avoids all of the problems you have in Evernote when you try to go back to some point in the outline and modify it. I have one with 10 main items, and three at several sub-levels under each. Just copy this note into your notebook and you are good to go for class notes (for example). 

 

The point I am making here is that there is a gap in perception between expectations (by users) and reality (the app developers have made), but there is nothing terribly insurmountable here. There are workarounds we can use until this perception gap is closed. You can edit elsewhere and copy/paste into Evernote, or edit in Evernote and copy/paste out. The core functionality of having everything stored in one place and available everywhere remains.