forum Suggestions for documents (editor and printing)
Started by casualjan
tune

people_alt 56 followers

casualjan

Hi,

since I started using notebook.ai I've been quite happy. Nonetheless I've got some suggestions. This one is concerned with printing documents as the current design has some issues. Please also take a look at https://www.notebook.ai/documents/125045 which illustrates some of the issues including some screenshots.

Editor Suggestions

This suggestion is mostly based on existing markdown editors like this forum input. I prefer these modes as the visual editor has some quirks that are hard to reproduce and report [see 0 below].

  1. A text only editor, probably markdown, would be great. It should still have the feature of adding links by typing @. Essentially the forum editor but for documents [1] ;)
    - This could improve the workflow for experienced or tech-savvy users. The text only editor would be an addition to the current WYSIWG-editor and not a replacement.
  2. The editor is WYSIWYG except for object links. These show up as [[Group-Key]], it would be nice to see the target's name on hover.
  3. Configurable link text, e.g. [[Rusty Sword|Item-123]] or better [Rusty Sword](Item-123) shows "Rusty Sword" and links to Item-123 (which may have another but secret name).
    - Currently, this is only possible by inserting a direct link on text which looses the color coding.
  4. Linking things via @-name would be nice. It seems I manually added the links in the document editor manually. @-linking works in worldbuilding notes.
Printing

Currently, there is no perfect printing option. The editor's and the text-only view's printing options are quite good but have minor room for improvements:

  1. text-only. Currently, links are shown as [[Group-Key]]. I expected the target's name.
  2. editor mode.
    - Similar draw back as above: links are shown as [[Group-Key]], the actual link text would be better.
    - Also, the top navigation bar is shown on every page but not needed (div#navbar-fixed).
    - Minor drawback: the line breaks are different. Ideally, they would be as in the editor. However, this seems impossible as there are too many page sizes to cater to (even A4 and US Letter to name two).
  3. viewing mode. Surprisingly, this was the least useful printing mode. While it shows the links as links instead of code, much of the content is missing.
    - The printing view should only consist of the main-tag (see html code) and fit the content parts (div document-name-bar and editor) to a printing page.
    - Currently, the sidebar takes up a lot of space and hides content. It should be gone in printing mode.
    - The text overflows to the right and roughly seven chars are missing.
    - Similarly to editor mode printing: ideally, the line breaks should be the same. However, having all the text would be enough.

Best Regards,
Jan

[0] In some cases, my headlines did not show as headlines. I'm not sure how to exactly reproduce this as it seems to be some copy-paste issue. After some trial and error I discovered the cause for the visual disparity: something overrides the "this is a headline formatting" with "this is a text". After removing formatting the headline is actually shown correctly as headline.
[1] Very minor and only issue I found with this editor: mixed lists are broken. I had to fake the sub-lists by using \- - otherwise they'd also be numbered.