I’d like to use DT for writing projects, but I also want to have access to a great full-screen editor. DT includes such an editor, but it’s not great. For one thing, I’d like to be able to set the display characteristics for the full-screen editor (larger text, different color text, different color background) without having it affect the actual, saved text. I’d also want to have much better control of the background, including the width of text (DT does this but with black bands on either side of the screen if using less than 100% text width).
A great example of full-screen editing is CopyWrite.app, but it lacks the many great capabilities of DT.
Any thoughts?
Bb
P.S. While I’m at it, would be great if DT properly converted carriage returns to html entities when exporting OPML. Better if DT and the other OPML-aware apps could get together and agree on shared standard formats so these apps (DT, OmniOutliner, SuperNotecard, NovaMind, etc.) could all handle the same data without losing any. Right now OmniOutliner has the best implementation, so maybe working with them…
Thank you for the feedback. As rich text documents support all formatting possibilities, the only way to have different full screen characteristics is to use plain text documents (many writing tools only support this anyway). Then you can use different fonts, colors and sizes.
But OPML is a very limited format and also used by RSS readers to im/export feeds and therefore for two very different jobs. Im/Exporting OPML without losing formatting isn’t possible.
Thanks for the response. I see your point on full-screen editors, although some (copywrite.app) provide limited formatting (bold, italics and underlining) in full-screen mode. The key there is full-screen “appears” differently without changing the font size and color of the actual text. OTOH, I’d be happy to use DT’s full-screen capabilities with plain-text documents if I could create left and right margins that were not black. Any possibility of giving user control of the background screen color?
With regard to OPML, there are certain problems with DT’s implementation. First, what DT refers to as the “description” is called the “_note” by OmniOutliner, NovaMind and (as of two days ago) SuperNoteCard. Second, any text in DT’s description field is inconsistently processed by DT before inclusion in the OPML file. For example, quotation marks are properly converted to HTML entities but carriage returns are not. This causes breakage in some of the other programs.
To get around these problems, I’ve set up an Automator workflow that uses BBEdit to “clean up” the DT OPML file. For example, it converts carriage returns to “ ”.
I recognize OPML has limitations, but given the benefit of sharing information between different applications (and using each application for it’s inherent strengths), it would be great if DT and other OPML-aware apps could agree on a basic set of standards so data can be shared without being lost.
You should be able to change the background color in the preferences but it doesn’t work (just tried this) - seems to be a bug which will be fixed in v1.1.
Most of these limitations are probably based on the fact that DT Pro tries to support both OPML created by outliners and by RSS readers.