Seeking a (living) canonical list of hyperlink schemes supported by Evernote.

[meri 4]

Hello, all!

 

I have a question that best fits in two parts. 

• Is there a canonical list of hyperlink schemes supported by Evernote? 

Some background: A great deal of the time I spend in Evernote is spent writing early drafts of (sometimes lengthy) documentation on a wide variety of topics. Since the majority of my writing will be published in either HTML or (interactive) PDF format, I use a lot of hyperlinks. I good percentage of these links are not composed of http/https URIs, but rather make calls to other services. In my experience, Evernote supports a very limited subset of the complete list of defined IANA URI schemes.

 

(Some schemes I frequently long for include: about, aim, apt, cvs, dict, facetime, file, geo, ldap, news (though nntp is supported), nfs, etc., etc. But my current Holy Grail of unsupported URIs is tel.)

• If not, can there be?   

Currently, I have a list (kept in Evernote, of course) of URI schemes I frequently use in my documentation. Each time a new Evernote release is dropped, I walk through the list to see if support for each URI scheme has been added. This is, as you can imagine, tedious. Moreover, it's kind of disheartening, in a silly way. The hope goes up! The hope goes down. The hope goes up! The hope goes down.

 

Ultimately, I am requesting that the Evernote team help save some wear and tear on my fragile emotional state by making this information regarding supporting URI schemes available in some way. This information could be as simple as a list of what schemes are supported, or something more substantial, such as why particular schemes aren't / will never be / will soon be supported.

 

Here are three ideas I've had as to how this could be made available.

1. Publish (and maintain) an online document (say, maybe, a FAQ or Knowledge Base entry) regarding URI scheme support. 
2. Include a (text|xml|read.me|whatever) file in each distribution listing this information. (Here's a wacky idea: make it a configuration option! Allow users to enable/disable URI schemes on their own! (Before everyone tells me I'm crazy: I realize this will never happen. And it's probably a good thing that it will never happen. But, again, a girl can dream.))
3. Publish it once in the release notes, and then publish deltas as necessary in future release notes. 

Should be doable, no? 

 

I am more than willing to donate my time and documentation skills to help write / maintain this (whatever it ends up being, if at all). I mean, I'm already kind of doing it on my own anyway, so it wouldn't be a stretch to maintain a web-based FAQ. I simply have a strong preference to not publishing such information unless I know it to be accurate, which is an insight I lack without help from Evernote. 

 

(I would like to take a moment to apologize to anyone who experienced a mental pang and briefly thought, "Schema! Schemata? Schemeta? Schemes. Hrmph." It's Friday, and I'm tired, and so I took the easy way out.)

 

Thank you for your time, and I hope you are all having a wonderful day!

 

Aloha,

meri

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Hello, all!

 

I have a question that best fits in two parts. 

• Is there a canonical list of hyperlink schemes supported by Evernote? 

Some background: A great deal of the time I spend in Evernote is spent writing early drafts of (sometimes lengthy) documentation on a wide variety of topics. Since the majority of my writing will be published in either HTML or (interactive) PDF format, I use a lot of hyperlinks. I good percentage of these links are not composed of http/https URIs, but rather make calls to other services. In my experience, Evernote supports a very limited subset of the complete list of defined IANA URI schemes.

 

(Some schemes I frequently long for include: about, aim, apt, cvs, dict, facetime, file, geo, ldap, news (though nntp is supported), nfs, etc., etc. But my current Holy Grail of unsupported URIs is tel.)

 

I know very little about hyperlink schemes, but I can tell you, and surely you already know this, that Evernote is a very poor tool to use in rich documentation development.  It is barely a decent rich text editor, is missing many of the basics of HTML list features, and is far, far from a good word processor like MS Word.  I wouldn't even put it in the same sentence as a document publishing tool.

 

So why do you want to use Evernote for this purpose?

 

Aren't there much, much better tools available?

 

Just so you know, Evernote has a long, long history of poor documentation, and is rarely, if ever, up-to-date.  They have made some recent improvements, but, IMO, the jury is still out.  So, while Evernote may surprise me, I think it is unlikely that the will provide you with the documentation you want, AND keep it up-to-date on a timely basis.