Text Formatting is Horrid

[oxjox 1]

I find this to be an issue with Evernote across all platforms. When pasting text from (multiple) external sources in to Evernote, it becomes a huge mess. I always have to select the entire document and reformat text style, font, and often reformat paragraphs. Any time I copy in text from Outlook (which I do very often) I have to reformat the entire document. It's a huge waste of time for me. What's most frustrating is if I come to the end of a paragraph and hit the Return key the text in the next line is a totally different format then the rest of the document.

I don't know what the solution is, constant plain type or constant reformatting or something else, but something needs to be fixed here. I find it far easier to create a document in Text Edit or even my email client then paste it in to Evernote for backup. That's not very efficient.

I realize Evernote isn't MS Word but I find it hard to imaging adding this capability would be all that difficult.

Also, add a strike through shortcut to the Mac client like I asked for when Evernote was in beta. The response I got was "we use Apple's built in inspector palette", but that doesn't fly for me. I use this button a lot and find all other platforms easier to work with compared to CMD+T, open drop down, click on single. Come on, seriously, add a strike through in the Mac client.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I find this to be an issue with Evernote across all platforms. When pasting text from (multiple) external sources in to Evernote, it becomes a huge mess. I always have to select the entire document and reformat text style, font, and often reformat paragraphs. Any time I copy in text from Outlook (which I do very often) I have to reformat the entire document. It's a huge waste of time for me. What's most frustrating is if I come to the end of a paragraph and hit the Return key the text in the next line is a totally different format then the rest of the document.

I don't know what the solution is, constant plain type or constant reformatting or something else, but something needs to be fixed here. I find it far easier to create a document in Text Edit or even my email client then paste it in to Evernote for backup. That's not very efficient.

I realize Evernote isn't MS Word but I find it hard to imaging adding this capability would be all that difficult.

Also, add a strike through shortcut to the Mac client like I asked for when Evernote was in beta. The response I got was "we use Apple's built in inspector palette", but that doesn't fly for me. I use this button a lot and find all other platforms easier to work with compared to CMD+T, open drop down, click on single. Come on, seriously, add a strike through in the Mac client.

Hi. Text formatting can be a little difficult at times, and the more formatting you copy / paste into a note, the more complex things get. I've posted about this on the forums as well. To be fair, though, you'll find similar problems in other apps (even Word) when copy / pasting, so I think developers everywhere must be struggling with this.

For now, I think the best solution is to strip out formatting before you put something into a note. I highly recommend the FormatMatch app (free) for this. I have it activated all of the time so that anything I copy is stripped of formatting, but you can easily deactivate it anytime. Also, if you have notes with problematic formatting, I recommend starting a support ticket and sending examples of it to the developers. The more data they have to work with, the more likely they are to arrive at a solution to the issues you are seeing.

As for strikethrough, Evernote developers may well have said that, but I don't remember seeing it. Could you link to that comment? At any rate, the app is improving all of the time, and I am sure the developers appreciate your input. As you know, there is a beta thread if you would like to participate in the new betas and offer feedback there as well.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

To be fair, though, you'll find similar problems in other apps (even Word) when copy / pasting, so I think developers everywhere must be struggling with this.

I don't see these problems in MS Word, and I have used Word for many, many years, both on Windows and Mac.

Actually, I find Word to be quite receptive and adaptable. After you paste a block of formatted text, Word immediately gives a little popup to change the formatting if you don't like how Word initially did it. The popup allows to you choose between "retain Source formatting" and "match destination styles", and maybe some other options. Most of the time I like how Word did the initial paste.

You can also choose "Paste Special" and get a wide variety of paste options.

So, I definitely think this is more of a problem unique to Evernote than a common rich-text editor problem.

[sener 0]

I completely agree to JMichael - I love Evernote as a cross platform solution and only aspect it's failing is rich formatting! Having used Microsoft's Onenote for quite a bit, I believe Evernote has a lot of little trick it can learn from it.

For example in Onenote (which is practically Word with some note taking enhancements) When getting a excerpt from the web the action of copy/paste generates a small footnote like link referencing to the website excerpt is taken in case you need to refer to the actual resource. The moment you paste you are given the choice to keep the format, merge it or not keep it... hovering on the options give you a real time view of what the note would look like if the option is chosen... I honestly think it doesn't get any easier than that... I really want Evernote to be my unified note taking solution but when you snip hundreds of things off the web and documents formatting and cross referencing becomes very important other than only a hierarchical design clippings. I know there are ways to cross reference links to clippings and such with Evernote but I still see room for innovation there... Just felt the urge to write this response as a feedback for Evernote folks to read and help us like them even more

[unfrostedpoptart 9]

As I've posted in various forums lately, I can't use EN for more than about a minute without running into some glaring problem with text (or graphics) formatting. I try.  I calm my breath and tell myself that I'll just edit and copy material from other apps and just paste into EN.  And then that doesn't work right.

 

Does anyone know what EN's internal document format is?  I'd hope they're using ODT.  Any way to find out or is this a company secret

 

Thanks,

 

 David

[George Goodman 10]

Evernote (the company) appears to suck at hiding the details of the Evernote Markup Language (ENML)  : 

http://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/enml.php

[jfry 1]

In addition to this, I often copy from Evernote and paste into Gmail, which seems to add 2 or 3 line breaks between every paragraph. I do this regularly because I prefer to draft outside of my email client, but it is getting very annoying and might be enough to stop me using Evernote...

[mhelephant 10]

Just to echo the keynote of this thread.... text formatting in Evernote *IS* horrid.

 

In addition to earlier comments I have one major gripe: Evernote needs user-configurable styles. I'm fussy about layout and design, and always want to (re)format text in notes, especially when I'm working with materia clipped from web pagesl. Currently (in Evernote for Mac OS X) when I want to format text it takes four keystrokes (call up the Apple text dialogue, select font category, select font, select font size). I need a single-keystroke solution, available within the note editing window: <apply style>. I will want to access at least five styles: bodytext with empty line between paras, bodytext without empty line between paras, main header, sub header and indented text (similar to <blockquote> in html).

 

It's ridiculous that formatting of text should be so clunky.

 

And as previous comments have said, things like line spacing are SO erratic in Evernote; for example, removing a paragraph break can toggle the formatting of a whole paragraph. Is this something to do with markup language? Whatever: it's just not good enough. Many users want good looking text (eg text that could be printed and look good on the page), and not just very convenient clipping (with junk formatting). Something looking more like a word processor page than an html page.

[sh.Preston 1]

An implementation similar to the Google Docs customizable styles would work well.

[geoffreydennis 0]

I have been an avid EN user for years, but the formatting issue is stopping me cold.  I may have to switch everything over to google docs.  Very, very frustrated!

[megsaint 441]

Why would you have to switch everything? Use your preferred text editor for editing text and store everything in Evernote. I use Drafts on my iOS devices and SimpleNote on my Mac. Maybe Evernote will make changes in the text editor. Or maybe they'll do some more work on core functions next. Doesn't seem like a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.