3 replies to this topic

[SimonS]

One of the consistent problems with formatting is getting it to work on iOS. Accordance along with many others have chosen to go down the plain text route.

 

Could I ask you to consider Markdown or Multimarkdown? The markup languages are simple and in a plain text format. Many notes apps on iOS have gone down this route. They allow simple markup of text and then it can be rendered. The note can be edited in plain text and then rendered to reveal the formatting. This would be much simpler than trying to create an RTF format plus it drastically reduces file size. Markdown is also viewable on nearly every computer OS available and the beauty of it is that you can edit your plain text document in any programme you like. It would also solve the problem of editing notes on iOS that were created on the Mac and losing the formatting as they are simple plain text documents. Multimarkdown would be better as it includes things such as footnotes. 

[rev.ken.han]

+1.

 

I'm already using multimarkdown in my user notes even though Accordance doesn't support it. Over the years my preferences for user notes / tools display, not to mention my eye sight, have changed. And after using Accordance for more than 10 years, my user notes is a huge mess with countless variations of fonts, sizes, etc. I'd love for Accordance to separate out content from formatting the way html / css separate things out. I'd love to be able to change the style of ALL my user notes by editing just one file!

 

Also, I am working on an extended translations hoping to import it as a user bible at some point. The best workflow that I've found is to use multimarkdown in a user note file, export it, and convert it to html and then import it back into Accordance, for the reasons stated by OP.

[SimonS]

Doesn't importing it back into Accordance via HTML mean that if you edit that note on iOS you'll lose all the formatting? I'm leaving everything in Markdown. Besides, The resources I'm using are book which have no note facility anyway, so I'm making all my notes in Byword and that's being synced via dropbox to NValt. It's a bit cumbersome, but for my uses Accordance iOS for actual study is far to limited anyway, so having my notes separate from Accordance, means that they are Bible Software agnostic.

[Scott Knapp]

Supporting Markdown for user notes is an interesting idea.  Of course, because we use our own text layout engine which is not HTML based, supporting it is not a trivial exercise.  We would basically need to either expand the text layout engine to support this alternate set of layout instructions (unlikely) or add the ability to convert back and forth from the internal text layout information to Markdown (more likely).  Keeping the layout information separate from the contents is also important when searching user notes for both scripture references and content.

 

Thanks for the suggestion and feedback,

 

Scott.