Kirby Krieger

I think we might be starting to conflate actions that are best, imho, considered separately. The thread is about (afaict) using highlighting and underlining and other _text markup_ tools. (The thread is titled "Text Selection".) It is not about what might be differentiated as _document_ or _page markup_ tools. Skitch (and whatever the built-in tools in Evernote are called) is, IME, excellent for document mark-up, and, in it's current form, useless for text mark-up. Preview, by way of example, does text markup quite well. Aside: the old beloved Skitch — prior to being swallowed by Evernote — was one of the best-designed utilities ever. It was common to see "Skitched" screen-grabs all over the Web — a stretch of growth that accelerated weekly until Evernote's unhelpful changes.

An excellent idea. I do think in the next five years we will have the kind of "academic" mark-up tools you mention readily available and easily integrated. (May be already available in some software.) You might search the Web for articles on academic workflows. There are whole blogs devoted to the topic. Of particular interest, take a look at that robust ugly duckling, DevonThink Pro. As an aside, having multiple versions of a base file, and saving only the instructions on how to mark-up the file (rather than copying the whole file) is how all current photographer's RAW workflow tools work. It's brilliant, efficient, and empoweringly useful. In the meantime, Scott's advice is, IME, spot-on: use Preview. It works well, at the cost of not being "in" Evernote. Note that you have a choice among five highlighter colors, and an underline. I think the underline looks best, but it _is not_ included in the summary in the Sidebar (neither are callouts). I color code my highlighting by use (e.g.: yellow — notes on the text; red — notes to the author; purple — notes to me). Unfortunately, there is as yet no way to show/hide by color, and the colors are not shown in the Sidebar summary (on OS 10.8.5, afaict). There is also no way to search just one's highlights, but the Sidebar contents are searched at the same time as the document (e.g.: search for "octopus" and the Sidebar will show only highlights and notes containing "octopus". If that kind of work-around doesn't meet your needs, I suggest finding another base application (not Evernote) for document and information storage and retrieval. HTH.

Yes, but that feature is not part of Evernote. I found the whole handling of editing PDF's inside Notes awkward at first, but "round-tripping" through Preview is easy, and the annotating tools are good. Preview maintains an excellent "Highlights & Notes" list that can be shown in the Preview Sidebar.

Click the icon in the top border of the Note. Screenshot (Evernote.Mac):

+1 for more, better pen settings, including _much_ finer line widths. Take a look at Paper by 53 for what can be done while retaining a dead-simple UI, and at Sketchbook Pro for iPad by Autodesk for what can be done to make the app as use-able as possible. The Moleskine Evernote notebooks (actual tree-space objects) make a nice alternative for those who want good writing/drawing tools, at the cost of having to photograph the pages to get them into one's Evernote database.

The OP asked about using Evernote to make 1,000 pages a month available to multiple people in multiple locations. The cost in person-hours to set that up and make it work is significant. I agree that the $5/mo charge (less in bulk) for Premium use is fair, and that Evernote does excellent work _for single users_ across multiple platforms. But that's not the subject here..

+1. It makes Evernote untrustworthy. It's not just line-breaks. Clip (afaict _anything_) from the Web, and play around with deleting line-returns (if that's what they are) by forward-deleting with the cursor at the end of the line, and deleting with the cursor at the start of a line. Mayhem. I also like when I paste with the cursor at the end of the Note and the clipboard contents are inserted at the beginning of the Note. Evernote.mac 5.5.1 on OS X 10.8.5.

Can't wait to see, and use. :-) A functional, up-to-date, fully-rationalized* Note Editor would be a huge step forward for Evernote. *Despite hours of investigation, I still have no idea how to control fonts, point size, styles (heading styles seem to be arbitrarily applied), line heights, or columns of content pasted into a Note.

Since Evernote did not, does not, and shows no sign of ever meeting you needs, it seems smart to use a program which does. It seems you are looking for a facile, cross-platform To-Do list manager. There are hundreds of these currently on the market, from the simple to the complex (OmniFocus). Having use Things, The Hit List, TaskPaper, and OmniFocus, I find Evernote's To-Do list management rudimentary in implementation and frustrating in use. YMMV. If it meets your needs, use it. If it doesn't, look elsewhere.

Unless you are going to take advantage of the value added by using Evernote, why not use any of the simple cloud storage and sharing services, such as DropBox or GoodleDocs? Wrapping each document inside an Evernote Note _adds_ a significant layer of complexity regarding accessing, editing, and versioning document files. There are advantages to using Evernote, but if all you want is to save the cost of mailing paper, I suggest a flatter workflow will meet your need at significantly lower administrative costs.

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):

Yes. That's why I needed the macro to click the "Save" button after changing any of the options in the Safari Web Clipper. It "saves" the step of having to close the open dialog in order to make the "Save" tile actively mapped to the {Enter} key. In the cases where the Evernote Web Clipper proposes the desired settings (for Notebook and for Tags)*, my key-chords using the same modifier keys and two keys next to each other ("i" and "o", modified with ⌥ and ⌘) is much easier to perform than one key-chord followed by {Enter} followed by a visual check to see that I didn't have a text field or dialog open. *Kudos here: the Web Clipper does a fantastic job of guessing where I want to store the current clipping, and with which Tags.

I filed a Support Ticket regarding this issue on Safari a few weeks ago. Just want to note here that the problem is that the two options are given equal billing (measured by screen real-estate), which is incommensurate with their use and utility. Swapping the function of the two buttons will not have enough of an effect to resolve the problem. (In fact, it is almost always smoother to select the last item in a series than the first or any one in between.) My work-around has been to use Keyboard Maestro macros to click the Safari toolbar icon (⌥⌘i) and to click the "Save" tile on the activated Web Clipper (⌥⌘o). In addition to improving the Web Clipper UI to better represent and meet the user's needs, Evernote would do well to add keyboard shortcuts for these actions.

+1. In the meantime, on Evernote.mac, I use DevonThink's free WordService, which includes: - Sort Lines Ascending- Sort Lines Descendingamong many useful small text editing utilities. These small programs will strip links and checkboxes, however. The checkboxes are easily replaced, but their status is lost. I don't use Evernote for task management. I do need to sort lines, however. WordService makes an excellent addition to my basic text tools.

+1. On my big and getting rotund list of seemingly obvious basic features that are missing.