Can anyone tell me how to improve the note writing interface in DT3 as it currently stands? Specifically, when I engage Full Screen, even if I set the width to 50% in Preferences, I find the text stretches all the way across the screen (a possible bug or a mistake of understanding by me, but I feel sure I could change it in DT2).
What I would like, if possible, is to have a narrowish text width in the middle of the screen and the rest either (a) a uniform colour, or (b) the margins one colour and the background a different colour (perhaps different shades of grey) to make writing longer notes as clean as possible, and devoid of distractions. This kind of interface has existed for a long time in dedicated writing apps, from Scrivener to Ulysses, Pages, even free apps like Simplenote.
Is it possible with this iteration at the moment, or would it require a feature request? I know @BLUEFROG has asked for bugs rather than feature requests, but a decent writing interface would genuinely improve DT3 and, I suspect, be relatively easy to manage (which is to say a clutter-free writing space in fully-screen mode, with Dark Mode and Light Mode toggling regardless of the mode set on MacOS.
[edited to say: I think the problem I was having was with newer, imported notes not formatted to DT3. When I create new plain text notes, I can achieve the effect I am looking for].
They were created either in Evernote or in DT2. I have copied and pasted into plain text notes now, created within DT3, so I can’t say the earlier format – very likely rich text as there were italicised portions. When I got to Preferences in DT3, Plain Text and Full Screen allow me to change background and font colours, but not Rich Text, which I suppose is a shame, as I would prefer to use Rich Text in order to reply Bold and Italics. I can edit in a Rich Text note in Full Screen in order to benefit from the background colour and text colour changes, but then when viewed in the main DT3 viewing pane, it’s white with very light coloured text. A small matter, but I know others have mentioned it.
Additionally, even the 50% setting for Full Screen Mode is still too wide for it to be used as a genuine writing screen. With Font Size 12, for example, which I use to write with, I get something like 22-23 words on each line. If the line length were about 75% of that, perhaps 15-16 words or so, that would be ideal. It’s not so much about number of words, but the space the writing area takes up on the screen. The apps I mentioned all tend to have that kind of width.
Now, I realise that this is a major update to an application that is not a pure writing app, so this may be of no interest to you at all. But if you could make that amendment, I think it would be all the better for it. Clearly, there are plenty of other more urgent matters to attend to, but there you have it.
As I said previously, I love this app and it will make a major difference to my doctoral research. Additionally, this ability to change the background and text colours in Full Screen mode is simply fantastic. So, yet again, I find something else to love about DT3.
I thought as much, hence I copied and pasted the text and created plain text notes.
Another thing I have found, in addition to the other full screen matters I raised, is that the quality of the font differs between plain text and rich text. Let’s say I choose Arial 12. It is much easier to read – the individual characters are more evenly spaced – in rich text than in plain text (where they can be unevenly bunched together). Again, for writing more complex work, the rich text format is more pleasant to use for this reason as well.
I am using Arial 12. To experiment, I have just Converted a plain text note to rich text (which essentially creates a second identical note), put both in Arial 12, and it is quite clear to see that some letters are squeezed closer together in the plain text version than the rich text version, where they are evenly spaced. It’s not a complaint, perhaps it’s not something you can (or want to) resolve, but if you’d like a screenshot. I’ll send one.
I take it you meant my System Preferences, rather than General Preferences for DT3 itself. If the latter, let me know and I’ll do that, along with my Editing Preferences if you want that.
You can see in the grey version (plain text) that many of the characters are much closer to each other (especially taller characters). In fact, as I look at it now, it happens for most words. These are screenshots from the viewing pane, but I can confirm they are almost identical when the note is double-clicked to open into a separate window and when viewed in Full Screen Mode (where the rich text documents appears with a grey background and light grey text as my settings are the same for plain text and full screen mode). It is possible that the grey background is to blame (in the full screen mode even the rich text document is affected very slightly, but not to the same extent as the plain text).
I was able to reproduce the issue, plain texts still preferred screen fonts. This was useful many years ago but doesn’t seem to be a good idea anymore, therefore beta 2 will improve this.
If you could also consider an option to narrow the Full Screen Mode to less than 50%, thus making the writing of notes easier within that mode, I believe that would also represent a considerable improvement for those seeking to write long-form or more complex notes. I reproduce the comment I made below for your convenience.
Additionally, even the 50% setting for Full Screen Mode is still too wide for it to be used as a genuine writing screen. With Font Size 12, for example, which I use to write with, I get something like 22-23 words on each line. If the line length were about 75% of that, perhaps 15-16 words or so, that would be ideal. It’s not so much about number of words, but the space the writing area takes up on the screen. The apps I mentioned all tend to have that kind of width.
