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looking for a bare bones outliner with NO fancy formatting
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Posted by Tiggerlou
Jan 14, 2021 at 03:47 PM
In the process of converting my hundreds of Clarisworks documents into Evernote and Dynalist files (thanks for the latter recommendation), I’m realizing that there’s a feature of Clarisworks that I’m missing in both of them, as well as Microsoft Word: bare bones word processing that doesn’t automatically clutter me up with annoyingly unnecessary formatting.
As a matter of fact, I often open up a new Clarisworks document to *completely strip* formatting from a block of text.
So many times, when I’m trying to copy something into Evernote, the text will get all snarled up with HUGE headline fonts. I fix that text only to have it happen again on the next line of text. Exasperating! I do not want to spend all my time editing out formatting that I never wanted in the first place, especially when I’m trying to grab text in a hurry.
Ditto with Dynalist. If I want to type a series of underscore characters there, to indicate a blank space in text that needs to be filled in later—arrgh I suddenly get italics. I do use the italics feature in Dynalist, but I don’t always want it. I also wish I could copy and paste text more efficiently in Dynalist. I can only copy and paste one line at a time.
By the same token, I have no use for task-management-style checkboxes or other fussy features cluttering up the document. Looking for clean, clean, clean. Just the text, ma’am, and nothing but the text.
Any recommendations for software that would do that, without a Swiss Army knife of features popping up and getting in my way? It would be great if it were an outliner, but that’s not absolutely necessary.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 14, 2021 at 04:17 PM
Give Obsidian a try. Or you could try Notebooks, which gives you a choice of three document types when you create a new one:
- Formatted (which is HTML)
- Markdown
- Plain text
Posted by jaslar
Jan 14, 2021 at 07:09 PM
Sometimes, the easy way is through a third program - a plain text editor like Notepad++, Gedit, or even Simplenote. Paste your formatted text into the text editor, which strips out embedded codes. Copy and paste again into your intended program.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 14, 2021 at 08:56 PM
Tiggerlou wrote:
>As a matter of fact, I often open up a new Clarisworks document to
>*completely strip* formatting from a block of text.
>So many times, when I’m trying to copy something into Evernote, the text
>will get all snarled up with HUGE headline fonts. I fix that text only
>to have it happen again on the next line of text. Exasperating! I do not
>want to spend all my time editing out formatting that I never wanted in
>the first place, especially when I’m trying to grab text in a hurry.
There are functions to clean up formatting in Evernote. Within a note right click and select Simplify Formatting (Ctrl+space) or Remove Formatting (Ctrl+Shift+space)
Posted by Tiggerlou
Jan 14, 2021 at 10:42 PM
Thanks for these suggestions!
I’ll keep my eyes out for any other comments on this topic.