Formatting

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I made a test doc with formatting: bold, italics, highlights, colored font, embed/transclusion.

I ten exported the doc as a markdown file, which I then opened. Only italics is rendered as such, neither bold, nor highlights nor colored font are rendered.

Inline HTML is not supported, although selecting text produces a pop-up toolbar which does most what I need, but upon export nothing is retained.

This means that, in effect, one is locked in with SiYuan if one does not want to lose formatting. For me this is a deal breaker.

Now, I may well be missing something crucial here, which is why I post this comment because overall SiYuan is a feature-rich, intuitively easy to understand note-taking app that is attractive.

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    • 88250

      Basically everything that can be done has been done, please export the .sy.zip and upload it to the post, we will see if we can find the specific problem, thank you.

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    • edmed

      Thank you. What are the technical limitations of the individual json files? (max size megabytes, max characters, or is that limited by the operating system)? Also, all json document files are all stored in the same directory? (the sql backend only looks to 1 place to find things to index?)

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    • edmed

      "Later, when we realized the above problems, we changed to use JSON"

      So is siyuan data stored in individual JSON files that is then indexed by the sqlite backend? Or is each note/document that is created stored in the sqlite db itself?

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    • 88250

      This may be a concern, we have tried our best to deal with exporting standard Markdown, such as supporting exporting references as footnotes. However, some formatting elements are missing and cannot be taken care of (such as the inline html you mentioned).

      It can be considered that the powerful typesetting function is directly related to the underlying storage format. As far as we know, there is currently no note-taking software that can guarantee rich typesetting formats and can be migrated at any time. The Markdown format appears to be portable, but this is based on the premise that only "Standard Markdown" is used. If extended syntax is used, its migration is more difficult than other open source structured formats.

      In the early days, SiYuan was also stored in Markdown. Later, when we realized the above problems, we changed to use JSON and completely opened the source code of SiYuan. Our purpose of doing this is obviously not to lock users in a specific private format, but to facilitate data conversion by users in the future.

      These are some of our considerations and choices, thank you for your trial and evaluation of SiYuan.

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