Why does DT support both formatted notes and rich text notes?

troejgaard · January 20, 2025, 11:46am

At least it’s (mostly) kept in the head and not totally compressed, without any white space – so you can edit it. But yeah, it’s supposed to be self-contained. I wasn’t aware it originated in part as a format to import from Evernote. That made some things more clear. There’s a reason it’s a separate format from standard HTML.

More from the manual:

[…] an identifying meta tag is inserted that lets DEVONthink distinguish formatted notes from normal HTML pages. Form tags, e.g., for checkboxes and input fields are not removed and the status of checkboxes and form fields is retained.

chrillek · January 20, 2025, 12:13pm

In the screenshot, only font classes are contained in head. Alignment etc is in the divs. div is used where p should be. And the sample is full of font elements which are deprecated. The DOCTYPE is missing.

I understand where all that is coming from. Also, why people like formatted notes (though I don’t see why one would prefer that over Pages or Word).

It’s just not something I’d like to use – too far away from best practices HTML-wise. One could probably improve it a lot by modern CSS in the head, though. Something like

.normal-text {
   font-size: 1em;
   font-weight: normal;
   text-align: start;
}

.normal-text-justified {
   font-size: 1em;
   font-weight: normal;
   text-align: justified;
   hyphens: auto;
}

And then using <p class="normal-text"> in the HTML itself. Basically paragraph and character styles. Instead of styled paragraphs and characters.

But that’s probably not feasible with the current editor etc

troejgaard · January 20, 2025, 12:40pm

I think I agree, I’ve only used Formatted Notes for clipping some things.

But if you want full WYSIWYG editing throughout the whole document? How do you keep track of all the spontaneously generated classes? Like you say, that’s probably not feasible with the current editor.

Notice that the screenshot of the converted RTF starts at line 37. I’ll paste the full document below. I don’t know why it includes DOCTYPE while the simple Tab test didn’t. (Because it was converted to, rather than created as Formatted Note?)

Converted RTF example (Full)

<!DOCTYPE html><html dir="auto" lang="en"><head><style><!--
body { margin: 1.5em; }

div { padding: 0px; margin: 0px; }

.sheet { font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }

table.sheet { background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 3px 0px; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; border-left-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); }

caption.sheet { font-weight: bold; font-size: 24px; color: rgb(128, 128, 128); margin: 0px 0px 10px; }

tr.head { background-color: rgb(188, 194, 199); text-align: left; }

tr.main { background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); }

tr.alt { background-color: rgb(237, 243, 254); }

tr > td.row { border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); }

th.row { font-size: 10pt; padding: 3px 10px; border-right-width: 1px; border-right-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); }

td.row { font-size: 10pt; padding: 3px 10px; vertical-align: top; border-right-width: 1px; border-right-style: solid; border-right-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); }

.info_top { font-size: 9pt; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); margin-bottom: 10px; }

.info_bottom { font-size: 9pt; border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); margin-top: 10px; }

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  body, table { color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-color: rgb(41, 41, 41); }
  a:link, a:visited, a:active { color: rgb(112, 165, 255); }
  table.sheet { background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); }
  tr.head { background-color: rgb(68, 62, 57); }
  tr.main { background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); }
  tr.alt { background-color: rgb(19, 12, 1); }
}

font.font0 { font-family: Baskerville; font-size: 24px; }

font.font1 { font-family: Charter; font-size: 16px; }

font.font2 { font-family: Menlo; font-size: 16px; color: rgb(145, 145, 145); }

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  font.font2 { color: rgb(110, 110, 110); }
}
--></style>
<meta name="DT:isEditableNote" content="Yes">


<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name="generator" content="DEVONthink 3.9.8">
<title>Font conversion test.rtf</title>

</head>
<body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;">
<div align="left"><font class="font0">Baskerville 24pt.</font> </div>
<div align="left"> &nbsp;<br></div>
<div align="left"><font class="font1">Charter 16 pt. </font><i><font class="font1">Italic</font></i><font class="font1">. </font><b><font class="font1">Bold.
</font></b></div>
<div align="left"> &nbsp;<br></div>
<div align="left"><font class="font2">Menlo (grey)</font></div>



</body></html>

</head>

chrillek · January 20, 2025, 12:55pm

Probably. I raised an issue re the missing DOCTYPE some time ago, and that was with conversion. They likely fixed that.

I agree that WYSIWYG and HTML don’t go well together. Never did. That’s why I was wondering why people who want the former don’t use Word or Pages and the like.

uimike · January 20, 2025, 12:57pm

Maybe because they are ok with WYSI+/-WYG ?

troejgaard · January 20, 2025, 1:21pm

Probably because it’s a cross-platform, mobile-friendly format that can display in just a browser and doesn’t need pages or word. And unlike markdown offers WYSIWYG… Circling back to OP: on the surface seeming so familiar to some that it can be mistaken for RTF

I prefer markdown because of the focus on semantic content when writing instead of presentation – and the versatility in output. But then I also like old school analog typewriters.

chrillek · January 20, 2025, 2:10pm

In theory. In practice, there are enough cases where it can kind of display, but things get lost. See your example above: The correct display already depends on the fonts being available locally. Which might be less probable for Baskerville or Menlo on Linux ;-). Not to mention that “WYSIWYG” makes little sense in the context of the Web: browsers come in all sizes, users have all kinds of preferences re fonts and their sizes, light/dark mode etc

And the advantage of a formatted note including images relies on them being included via data URLs. Which makes the files potentially huge and editing them challenging. As to the portability, see the last post in this thread: HTML code failure in DTTG with Formatted Note

Ah well. The time of silver bullets is long past, I guess. (Word, btw, is nowadays pretty much cross-platform, given that Pages and LibreOffice et al can read and write that format).

Disclaimer: Everybody can use whatever they want, imo. They should just be aware of the (dis-)advantages of their choice. Expecting that an HTML-based format can be anything close to WYSIWYG might lead to frustration. WYSIWYG on paper is easy. In a browser – not so much.

Fran · January 21, 2025, 10:28pm

About Evernote. I HAVE to use it for items I might wish to access from IOS because I just don’t have the time to try to make DT2G work. It did for a while. and the next thing I knew, Dropbox crippled my system with backup files. So now it’s disabled and DT2G is too.
If I need to find a recipe on my iPad, I look in Evernote. DT2G is great when it works. Some day I’ll try again to get it to sync, but I’m too dispirited now.

uimike · January 21, 2025, 10:50pm

Hi Fran, yep, I know the feeling, when you need a file, you need a file.
Maybe you want to try syncing it via Bonjour, that’s what I did. I abandoned iCloud, dropbox and all the other stuff.

BLUEFROG · January 22, 2025, 12:49am

This is not due to DEVONthink nor DEVONthink To Go, but an erroneus setting in your Dropbox application (and one we have documented). There is no need to have our sync data on your Mac and indeed, it has nothing to do with how DEVONthink and DEVONthink To Go sync.

From In & Out > Sync > Dropbox section of the built-in Help and manual…

Fran · January 22, 2025, 2:35am

I know the problem is not DEVONthink. It’s the sync option. I just haven’t been able to make it work. That’s on me.
I remember struggling with Bonjour a couple of years ago before I just gave up. Eventually, I’ll try again. I don’t look forward to i.

BLUEFROG · January 22, 2025, 4:39am

If you open a support ticket, I can give you a some extra help.

Tekl · January 24, 2025, 7:45pm

This is why the TextBundle/TextPack Format was created. It’s similar to RTFD. It would be great, if DT could edit such files.

meta · January 25, 2025, 10:04pm

Worth noting that if you want to save a web page to DEVONthink, you can use Safari’s .webarchive format, which bundles the page and all the necessary resources into a single binary plist file.

There’s also the WARC format, which is pretty much the standard since it has been adopted by libraries and is an ISO spec. However, the software available to make WARC archives isn’t great from a user experience point of view, and DEVONthink doesn’t seem to support WARC files.

BLUEFROG · January 26, 2025, 7:07am

True but changing technologie, including dynamic loading of remote content and tons of JavaScripts (many not especially good), have limited to usefulness of webarchives on many popular sites. That being said, many of those are also superficial, clickbait-filled, paywall surrounded sites built more for opening your wallet than providing deep and useful information Fortunately, there are still millions of sites out there that have better intentions, information, and still work well as webarchives.

uimike · January 26, 2025, 11:07am

Interesting about WARC. Webarchive, for me, has been a mixed bag - older (say, 2- 3 years) files saved as .webarchive often don’t load at all, or load with many errors in DT for me (i.e., the webkit). So I am settling on pdf and formatted notes.

rmschne · January 26, 2025, 11:20am

Webarchive has been discussed in this forum for a few years. Word is Apple has “deprecated” the format, but I know no more that, say this thread

Me, for 99% of the internet pages I save into DEVONthink, I do a PDF from Safari Reader view direct to DEVONthink. When it doesn’t work, I attribute the failure to the web site either wanting me not to print, or whatever. Sometimes things that don’t go to PDF from Safari on macOS work fine on Safari on iOS. Dunno why. The world is not perfect.

meta · January 26, 2025, 3:57pm

It’s possible to turn WebArchive into regular HTML with embedded resources, so it’s a fairly safe choice. I’d probably go the embedded HTML route from the start, and lose a little disk space in favor of futureproofing.

But in fact, I tend to turn web pages I want to save into Markdown, since it’s generally the text content I care about.

Phileosophos · January 27, 2025, 12:26am

Better question: as a user of the software, why shouldn’t I prefer having both?

laudunum · January 31, 2025, 5:50pm

I’m going to echo this but also note that the markdown editing is getting closer to ideal—the ideal being something like what Typora offers where you write in markdown and Typora gives you WYSIWYG as you go. It’s really remarkable, and once you’ve experienced it, you wonder why all markdown GUI editors don’t do the same. (I’d also like to put a plug in for their dropdown menus of style options. Currently, DT offers only one option. I’d love to see there be multiple.)