Challenges with the automatic “RTF to Markdown” converter [solved in DEVONthink 3.8]

[pete31]

@BLUEFROG

Paste and Match Style is not an uncommon paste method, frequently used in rich text, Word, Pages, etc.

Paste and Match Style is an uncommon paste method in Markdown.

What a user puts on the clipboad shouldn’t be changed unless the user explicitly tells an app to change it. Period.

@BLUEFROG

People also wanted the ability to convert between rich text content and Markdown.

Understood. But

• if users want RTF to Markdown conversion then they should have to use an extra shortcut for that.

• if users don’t want to change anything while pasting then they shouldn’t be forced to remember a new shortcut, i.e. they should be able use the same shortcut as they did for years.

I know no other app that replaced the behavior of a shortcut for a new feature.

This reminds me of removing the ability to search the whole Markdown source as discussed in this very interesting thread DT3 searching markdown footnotes fails. In this thread we were told:

@BLUEFROG

there’s no indication we have many people searching the source of Markdown files for things like MMD metadata or item links. We do have data people were having problems searching Markdown since it was searching the source and also bloating the concordance.

It seems that again some users requested a new behavior and again DEVONthink replaced the old behavior instead of adding the new one.

And again this seems to have happened without knowing how users use DEVONthink or without thinking through the new behavior.

No problem if new features are added, but simply replacing old behavior without an option to get the old behavior back is a no go.

@cgrunenberg please add an extra shortcut for RTF to Markdown conversion or make the automatic conversion optional. I really don’t understand why DEVONthink started to replace well established behavior with some fancy things.