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Experimental Rich Text Plainifier

jkjjkj
edited April 2016 in Windows

Version 1.0.7 has experimental support for rich text - or more precisely the making of plain notes from rich text.

This does not allow you to make formatted notes! well, not yet anyhow.

This feature is disabled by support, but there's a switch in the settings to enable it.

But beware! it could mess up notes. Obviously, it can only affect notes edited whilst active, so you might want to switch it off when working with important stuff.

What is does:

The main purpose currently, is to provide clickable links inside notes. Things that look like links will be highlighted and when clicked on, will launch your browser.

You can paste bits of content from websites into a note and rich content will be converted to plain text when you save the note. Notes are always stored as plain text. Only the text content is kept, fancy formatting and images are discarded.

Comments

  • This version seems better in terms of text size. Have you changed something?

  • yes! I enabled the HighjDpiScaling option. Not sure that it would make any difference, but the idea is that it automatically accommodates high density displays on Windows, rather than the stock 96 dpi.

    Glad that it does something useful.

  • Also, i've been running my copy here with this "rich text" mode on for a few days and it's been ok. Plan to flip the option at some point to on by default.

    Clickable links are too useful.

  • New version 1.0.9 posted with fixes to this mode.

  • If clickable links are too useful perhaps that option should be off by default ;-)

  • jkjjkj
    edited April 2016

    Yes, i almost made it the default for 1.0.9. However, There are a few oddities still. For example, you can't always paste certain things in "rich" mode.

    For example, source code cut and pasted from a website fails to appear at all. This is because the HTML seen is usually with a <PRE> tag. If I emit the text inside such a tag, it will be horribly mangled. So im not sure how to approach this.

    im wondering if it's possible for the formatter, which takes plain text to rich, to spot things like this and convert back to PRE.

    Alternatives are either to give up and store the HTML, or to convert to something like markdown instead of true plain text, since markdown is still quite readable.

  • edited April 2016

    I tried pasting in a 2x2 table from Word containing...

    1 2
    3 4

    It looked fine, saved it, came back to it and the table was gone, with the text left un-formatted like this:

    1
    2
    3
    4

  • That's correct for now.

    The general idea is that formatting is a presentation operation rather than coded into the note itself. There could, for example, be formatting options or styles to choose from.

    However, for layout I'd have to somehow preserve the fact that there was a layout in the plain version. I'm gravitating to the idea that something like markdown should be the plain version. Although this isn't totally plain, it's still readable as a text note. Yet it's still able to capture enough about layout or styling to be useful.

    Based on this, a note is translated into HTML for viewing and editing, then translated back to markdown for saving. Anything you edit by hand should be accommodated, but random website pastes can result in losses (which, quite often as a good idea).

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