Android
3.5.8
3.5.12
Rich Text Editor
When I click the edit note button in the Android app I get a screen that looks like HTML. Anyway, it isn't plain text. And I want to be able to edit plain text on my phone. Is that possible? Thank you.
Hi, are you referring to the codes and things that you see in your document when you do formatting like bold or setting a heading or putting in a URL?
Joplin and other note taking apps use a format called markdown. The codes and things that you're seeing in your document that you might be confusing with HTML are actually markdown codes.
If you avoid all forms of formatting there shouldn't be any codes and the document will essentially be text but in Joplin the file name extension is not .txt it is .md
If you select all the text and copy it and there's no formatting codes should paste into anything else as text.
Also.
This might get you what you want. There is no direct export to text without markdown codes. This is the next best thing.
Copy-Paste Plain Text
On mobile, open the note and select all â copy, then paste into any plain text editor (like a simple .txt note app) â this gives you the rendered text without markdown characters.
Let me know if that helps or if you have a different scenario.
BTW, if you look at the top of the editor when you are adding a comment by default the letter a is highlighted. To its left is an icon with the letter M and a down arrow. That is the button you select to enter and have recognized markdown codes.
To add to LeoWâs reply, if you have a computer, it would be beneficial to sync your notes to the desktop client as well, as it provides an option to convert imported html notes to markdown (there should be a banner at the top when opening the note, and I think recently a feature was added to convert between note formats in bulk). If you convert your html notes to markdown, it will be more human readable in the raw format compared to html.
Also, incase you are unaware, on the mobile app you can use the Rich text editor by opening a note in edit mode, then pressing the 3 dots menu in the top right, and choosing âEdit as Rich Textâ
Thanks your responses. To give some background, I was a longtime Evernote user but I just switched to Joplin since I just wanted a basic note program that didnât cost $250/year. So far, Joplin desktop works fine on my Windows 11 PC. And it works fine for reading notes on my Android. But I want a simple way to edit notes on Android. Mrjo18âs suggestion to edit as rich text sounds good but I donât have that option in the 3 dots menu. It only shows the option to âedit as markdownâ. Iâll include copies of a typical note in read-mode and in edit-mode to confirm the formatting I am looking at. Please let me know how I can edit in rich text or if there is some other way to make my notes easily editable on Android. Hereâs the note in edit modeâŚ
If the 3 dots menu shows edit as markdown, that means the rich text editor is already enabled (you press edit and markdown to toggle back to the markdown editor).
I think you need to convert the note from html to markdown on the desktop app as mentioned, in order for it to render properly in the rich text editor on mobile
I tried converting 3 notes from html to markdown on the desktop and now they are easily editable as simple text in the Android appâthank you! That pretty much resolves my issue. However, is there a way to convert all my notes in bulk from html to markdown so I can edit them this way, or do I have to do it one by one? And do you foresee any downside to doing this, keeping in mind I want my notes in the simplest text format?
Well,
Evernote uses a proprietary file format and when you save your Evernote notebooks out to a file the notes have HTML code in them. This you have seen. Joplin will import those files and attempt to save them as HTML which creates all those codes. When you import via markdown it creates a much simpler file format that you're looking for.
It's been a while since I've done an Evernote import but my recollection is that you can import The Notebook as either HTML or markdown.
Do you recall which one you used when you did the import?
If you chose HTML the quickest/easiest way I can think of would be to reimport those notebooks and make sure you choose to import them to markdown format.
I also have some more specific information for you regarding the process of switching from Evernote to Joplin smoothly. I know to convert the proper way to export from Evernote which for some will be tedious what is the only way to recreate The Notebook structure.
I have some information about notes with internal bidirectional links.
There's a bunch of things to look out for and some procedures best followed.
I'm kind of a slug. I am in the middle of a new year of Evernote licensing and I am a subscriber to Joplin cloud at the same time.
I've been learning about all of the ins and outs of moving away from evernote.
GitHub hosts a very nice Evernote export/backup tool that grabs all of your notebooks for you and gives you the ability to save each notebook out as a separate file. This is the only way to recreate the folder structure of notebooks when you import them into Joplin.
Other tips too. For example, I used to use and rely on the Evernote markup feature where you could draw lines and boxes and add text.
I have replaced that with a couple of nice open source tools that specialize in that. One of them is multi-platform so I know it runs on Windows and Linux I'm not sure about Mac.
The other is Windows only but is capable of doing scrolling web page captures among other types of captures and has very good OCR.
You can also set it up to automatically upload a screen grab to your preferred cloud provider and get from the cloud provider the shareable link so you can put it in a note.
Anyway, I will after getting some sleep and then drinking some coffee post my notes so you can look at them and see if there's anything that applies to your scenario.
This is all interesting information that I hope will be useful to other users migrating from Evernote to Joplin. For myself, I already switched and made some extensive edits inside Joplin so I don't want to reimport from Evernote. I must have exported from Evernote as html. Now, if there is a way to convert my html notes in Joplin to markdown, that would be handy but if not I can move forward without that. Maybe there is a tool to export the Joplin notes, convert them and reimport as markdown?
If settings > note > "use the plain text editor" is enabled, it may also help to disable it. This setting replaces both the Markdown and Rich Text editors with a minimal-functionality text-only editor.
Hi,
The process of switching between HTML and markdown is not related to how you export the data from evernote. It has everything to do with a choice you make when you choose to import the data to Joplin. You can select HTML or markdown.
If you've already done extensive editing here is another option it's not great but it's better than doing one at a time. You can go back into Evernote and create one new notebook and then Cherry pick the notes from different notebooks that you want and that are important to you to have in Joplin with the correct formatting. The result will be one Evernote notebook with 25 or 50 notes from different Evernote notebooks. Export that one notebook from Evernote being sure to make all the appropriate choices when exporting regarding attachments and links and things.
Then go through the import process with Joplin and choose markdown during the import.
See attached picture:
I disabled the âuse plain text editorâ setting and that seems to have resolved my issue 
I will try that out for a while and see how that goes. Thanks to all who responded to my messages.
YES. If you had that turned on you disabled the standard Rich text/markdown editors and went with a more stripped down editor.
