Why can't Joplin showing colors by default? When I copy my original notes from Evernote, first it shows EXACTLY what I copied from Evernote, but then once I click on other notes and come back, this note becomes black&whilte WITHOUT colors. This is very inconvenient! Why can't Joplin support colors automatically?
Joplin converts notes to markdown internally unless you explicitly imported them as html. Markdown doesn't support text colourisation so that info is lost.
There isn't really a good way to do both. The main way that Joplin could support colours would be to add html tags and inline styles around a word which will colour correctly in the rendered output but now hinders readability of the source text.
e.g. it would be something like
# Title
This is <span style="color: red;">red</span> text
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Thanks for replying. I did try to export my Evernote to HTML, and then import to Joplin. But some of the screenshot (cropped pic) in my Evernote cannot be displayed in Joplin. So my only option is to export Evernote to ENEX format and then have them imported to Joplin.
I also noticed that the Markdown text editor cannot keep the format of my notes in Evernote: such as indentation, line space, etc...
I am very ignorant of the topic. Is "Markdown" the only format that Joplin accepts? I understand that it took years for Evernote to make their editor quite easy to use. Hopefully Joplin can make it better soon.
Anyway, still huge thanks to the Joplin team.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language (which is what you also use on this forum, for example *bold*, [links](joplinapp.org) and ## headings).
Essentially it stores its formatting in the very text you write rather than it existing as kind of "properties" of notes like you get in something like a word processor which makes it rather nice for note taking and websites.
What Joplin does is take this Markdown text and turn it into HTML which is what you see displayed. This is most obvious if you use the Markdown editor (i.e. when the left side of this little toggle switch is highlighted):
The other editor, the richtext one, formats your code to HTML instead but Joplin stores everything as Markdown so when you use this editor it actually performs a conversion (with exceptions). There are some considerations being made to better support some of these more fancy features in the richtext editor but at the moment it still stores all new notes as Markdown (with HTML nested within).
The export type is unrelated, what I'm referring to is the import type. If you import your ENEX as HTML then all your formatting is preserved at the cost of making it much more difficult to edit your note in markdown.
Hello Daeraxa,
Many many thanks for the detailed explanation. I now understand the markdown vs. richtext editor better.
"If you import your ENEX as HTML then all your formatting is preserved at the cost of making it much more difficult to edit your note in markdown."
Thank you for the tips! I should import ENEX as HTML. I just tried, and it works out great.