How to create a text block / blockquote / codeblock / any sort of visually distinct block of text at all?

[GlyphGryph 1]

Does anyone know how to do this? I've been completely unable to find out anything in over an hour of looking via google search, no one who uses the app knows how, and I'm finding it incredibly frustrating.

 

I've got large sections of things that I want to copy/paste into evernote, but I want to clearly see it is not part of the things I was writing, but was brought in from elsewhere.

 

In a similar manner, I often want to make asides, or otherwise separate a block of text from the main body of the document.

 

Pretty much every other piece of software I've ever used makes this trivial. In fact, these forums offer multiple ways to accomplish this!

 

You can do this

Or you can  do something like    this right here

Is there any way to do this sort of thing in Evernote? It would make my notes significantly more useful.

[gazumped 11,652]

Evernote's editor has had a series of value-adds,  and the latest versions are better than they used to be.  But there are still limitations,  and this is one.  (The forum editor software is not in any way related to Evernote.)

 

Until some more upgrades hit the street,  the options are - use a different typeface;  copy/paste from another (and better) word processor;  use a picture file;  or output your layout to PDF.

[Imagenomad 20]

What Gazumped said ^^ plus:

 

Put your cursor in the text block and click Menu > Format > Text > Increase Indent Level but this only indents the left of the paragraph and not the right. But combined with changing the font/italicising/whatever, this may be enough for you.

 

Another thing you can do is to insert a 1x1 table into which you put your text block. With a judicious choice of % of page width, and an increase in the indent level (Menu > Format > Text > Increase Indent Level again) of the table cell as a whole and not the text inside the cell, you can at least have a text block that is indented on the left and doesn't reach the right margin. Unfortunately however, you can't then get rid of the surrounding lines of the table cell.  

[DrewDavid 4]

+1 could have used this feature today

[Kirby Krieger 72]

And don't forget horizontal lines ("⇧⌘h").

 

My workaround: insert a "My Notes" area at the top of the Note and put any notes for myself about the Note there.  I have a macro that inserts "My Notes:" and then "TypeHere" on the next line, bulleted, followed by a horizontal line.  Of course, this doesn't give me in-line commentary, except at the head of the Note.  Still, I have found it meets a need.  When I clip using the Web Clipper for Safari, I often include some text in the "Add Comments" field, and then replace this text with my "My Notes" header section.

 

The Note Editor in Evernote needs, IME, a whole lot of work to bring it up to date and make it work well.  Among much, adding and removing horizontal lines changes the paragraph formatting in ways that are not predictable, and there is no way to control the line height of added line-breaks or paragraph breaks.  Both of these buggy behaviors make formatting my "My Notes" header  a frustrating exercise in interacting with capricious software.

 

Screenshot (in this case the Note holds a PDF file, but it does not have to):

 

[John Christopher Jones 29]

Although there isn't a way to do this in the Evernote client itself, ENML (the XML format Evernote notes are saved as) does provide a way. As a result, I've gotten kinda spoiled using bordaigorl's Sublime plugin for Evernote. It lets you write in Markdown, which gets converted to ENML when sent to Evernote. So, you can use block quotes and pre-formatted text blocks, in addition to various other XHTML tags that you don't normally get access to in the Evernote client.

I think the easiest way to fake this in the current Evernote client is to make a 1x1 table. This will give you a box and some margin and padding around your text. It'll look a lot like a block quote on a forum.

[ravenberg 0]

@John Christopher Jones That is a wonderful package to sublime! Great share, thanks! 

[markschwarz 0]

@John Christopher Jones, thanks for sharing the Sublime plugin.  That's exactly what I was looking for!  Evernote, thanks for making the API accessible enough for riffs like this.