Evernote import discards styles

[laurent]

@devonzuegel

I figured this was a bug in my spike, so I tried to import the same file with the existing ENEX importer. That didn’t work either, so I believe this may be a bug with the original importer. Interestingly, I then tried dragging-and-dropping the file from Evernote to Joplin, which did work. I looked for an existing GitHub issue on this and didn’t find one. Want me to open one?

This was actually recently fixed there: Importing enex breaks audio links · Issue #1723 · laurent22/joplin · GitHub

@devonzuegel

It’d preserve the raw XML rather than simplifying it to Markdown. A hacky implementation would be to effectively remove this line: ReactNativeClient/lib/import-enex.js#L230 . A robust implementation would of course have to handle the images properly too, and there are probably some other edge cases I’m not thinking of.

That sounds good. Evernote's HTML format is good enough as it is and includes all the styling in the tags. The key part is indeed how to import resources and how to make sure they are linked properly from the HTML (for example image tags will have to be replaced to point to Joplin's created resource). Ideally the existing code from the Enex import should be re-used but it's a bit of a mess so it might have to be refactored a bit first.

@devonzuegel

That approach where we don’t differentiate between clipped and normal notes may not be the desired behavior for everyone, though. We could do the differentiation at the importer step as you suggested (though that’s not ideal for my use case). Another way we could do this is to keep the single ENEX importer and then pop up an additional menu where folks choose between one of:

As a first step I'd prefer your first solution of having two menu items, though I'd named them differently. Maybe just as ENEX – Evernote Export File (as HTML) and ENEX – Evernote Export File (as Markdown) (or maybe "to HTML" / "to Markdown". I think simplified/raw might be a bit confusing as it's not clear what would be happening.