Jump to content

Print font suddenly very small


Recommended Posts

In Evernote 6.1.2.2292 (302292 public), a note that would take 5 pages printed in the 12-point font it was created with is suddenly printing in a very small font, in 3 pages.
A 1-page note printed in that version came out normally.

Is this expected behavior, or a bug.
(If expected, I'll need to transfer anything I want to print to a different program, because I don't seem to have any control over the print size.)

Link to comment
  • Level 5

I just tested both a single-page and a multi-page note, and they both printed out in the appropriate font and size. So what you're seeing shouldn't be the expected. You're right, there isn't really control over print factors in Evernote. I wonder whether simply exiting the program (File > Exit to quit it completely) and restarting might clear it up.

Link to comment

@eric_treelight

Evernote has, unfortunately, been terrible at printing for many years as you can see from these results from searching "print font" in these forums. There are many posts like yours dating back to 2011 (and probably earlier), some of which which have responses from Evernote employees recognizing the problem and then saying that they'll investigate and probably fix it.

More than 5 years later, users are still posting threads like yours saying "What the heck happened to my font size when I printed?" In addition to font sizes, other printing problem areas include: italics, underlining, links, the actual appearance of text, check boxes, lists and bullets, quantity of pages, etc.

Here are some of Evernote's prior announcements somewhat related to this. 

  1. We fixed it! (Can't find link to the specific update/announcement now, but I'm sure an Evernote employee could. I believe it is from several years ago.)
  2. We're going to fix quality issues! (CEO's claim from 2014)
  3. Now we're really fixing it! (Been working on this since ~mid 2013.)

Given Everbug's Evernote's record, I have completely given up on Evernote for printing. I now copy-paste my documents into Google Docs and print from there. It is, sadly, the only reasonably user-friendly way to print from Evernote that I have found.

I believe that users aren't printing and/or complaining about printing enough for Evernote employees to fix this. It's just not a priority and maybe never will be.

[Evernote-branded socks, though, were at one point a priority, as were WorkChat, many UI redesigns, color tagging, presentation mode, etc.]

For reference, this picture shows the differences between Google Docs correct font size 18 vs Evernote's (supposed) font size 18 when printing. I didn't zoom quite evenly in the picture, but if you just count the words that fit on the first line, you'll see the difference. (The first sentence is the same in both.)

Evernote's Arial size 18 is smaller than Google Docs' Arial size 18.

The pic also shows other Evernote printing glitches, such as rendering text that is weirdly hard to read because some parts of the letters are just mysteriously missing.

 

printing font size.jpg

Link to comment

Thanks for the comprehensive reply.
GoogleDocs is a decent option.
I pasted into an HTML file, but didn't like the result.
Will try Word, next.

Yeah. Bug fixes don't sell. New features do.
And to be fair, printing is a hard problem to solve.

Evernote is great for short notes, then. Ideally less than one page, definitely no longer than two.
The thing is, I've begun using it for everything...
:__)

Link to comment
  • Level 5
1 hour ago, eric_treelight said:

Evernote is great for short notes, then. Ideally less than one page, definitely no longer than two.
The thing is, I've begun using it for everything...
:__)

Don't want to hijack your thread, but just to say that I think some of the enraged venting (which is not what you're doing!) that occurs on these forums may be due to this: we start using Evernote for short scraps of info, find out it works great, and then want to write novels or manage our businesses on it. When we run into problems pushing the Evernote envelope (Evernolope?), some of us decide it's all Evernote's fault. Like having a girlfriend who helps you with your Spanish, but then won't write your English lit term paper for you, and dumping her with a nasty tweet. Or something.

That said, back to the thread: printing really ought to work right, difficult though it may be to program. But the failures seem to be pretty random, making it hard to fix.

Link to comment

Great comment, Dave. I can understand the frustration, though. The thing is, they're already doing one thing on screen that I LOVE--namely, they don't automatically add an extra line of whitespace when intending to create a list element. That keeps things tight, which is WAY better than the standard HTML mechanism, which adds all kinds of vertical whitespace I detest. That's one reason I like Evernote so much. (I like "Evernenvelope", too. :_)  That, and the fact that all my notes are right there, easy to get to, with a great nav pane.

Anyway, since they're doing non-standard online formatting, they have written their formatting engine. So everything they do with respect to tables (another deep problem) and printing they have done themselves. Those are SUPER tough problems. Very smart people have spent decades working on them, to get them close to right. So it is understandable that there would be issues.

But I also understand the frustration of others. To have something so lovely, we just want it to work!

:__)

Link to comment

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...