Feature Request: Color Text/Color Text Background

SamMarrocco

While the current highlight and ’priority settings allows some visual “grouping” of items, I’d like to suggest the replacement of highlighting with the ability to color Text and Text Background. This is a more capable system of indicating items than a single highlight color.
As a bonus, text color/text background color gives the ability to use text as a more useful version of headers. While the existing headers (different text sizes) are fine for large screens, they are less useful on smaller screen devices, i.e. phones & tablets, where screen real estate is at a premium. Colored text/backgrounds allow for a ‘visual grouping/focus method’ that does not require more screen space.

they86

Colored text & colored background has about 5000 useful use cases…
It is THE reason I’m (reluctantly) using Workflowy instead of Legend right now.

SamMarrocco

Felt this needed a ‘poke’ to bring it up again after a year.
Color, combined with adjustable font size opens up a world of improved organizational possibilities. I, also miss having it from previous organizers I’ve used.

they86

Hi Sam, thanks for poking! 🙂 Like you, I still believe colored text and highlights would be a huge added value to Legend…

The problem is that Legend works with .md Markdown files and markdown doesn’t support colored text natively.

But… Why not throw that obsession with markdown overboard?!

Trilium Notes for example uses HTML instead, and the CKEditor they use offers a complete WYSIWYG editor, including colored text and higlights
I once suggested to @Jay to use RICH TEXT FILES (.rtf) instead of Markdown, which would offer an isane compatibility with Microsoft Word, Libre Office, Google Docs, etcetera. Ideal if you want to attract Business Customers!

People keep hyping over how great markdown is because “the files are readable by a human”. Yeah, sure…
But who actually DOES read and edit his large collection of markdown files outside of the software interface of their choice, and goes on **reading ** and __editing __ ###NOTES that look **_Like This _ **? 😛

Time to ditch the markdown.
Time to offer more features to the users! 🙂

SamMarrocco

they86
Hi there….couldn’t agree more about the versatility color would bring.

I won’t presume to speak for the devs, but I can’t imagine that Legend’s use of markdown files" prevents the use of color text (natively or otherwise). I believe Dynalist was based upon markdown (I’m not certain about Workflowy), and they both have pretty versatile color text. In fact, being locked into markdown made the editors very non-wysiwyg for a long time. I’ve never seen that type of annoyance from Legend.

I would think that color, like headings, highlighting, item types, and a myriad of other things that Legend already has is just as possible (obviously, once the devs deem it feature worthy enough to implement). The more I think about it, Legend’s headings and highlighting seem like they’re 75% of the way towards a text/background color feature.

I agree with you about the hype about markdown…..if one more person tells me how human-readable it is (or JSON, or XML, or SOAP, or HTML, ad nauseum) I’ll puke. Latin is human-readable too, but not if you don’t learn it 😉

I don’t particularly care so much about the format of the object-based data the devs use. They could store it in Klingon as far as I care–as long as no one can say "we’re limited by our choice of <fill in the blank>. If the datatype is a limitation, then yes, the limitation should be removed. Legacy is a heavy weight to drag around every day in code, to be sure.

they86

I used to be the same as you ('I don’t care what format my info is stored in, as long as it works'), but I changed my mind.

A huge advantage of using HTML or RTF is the compatibility with other tools.

Example from Workflowy, that uses markdown:

you can export your text with the colors included…
but you can’t import colored text: Workflowy will just erase the color and take all text as “black” 🙁

Use case:
I have about 300 pages of text (a novel I’m writing) with different parts of the text marked in 4 different colors: grey for sentences that might be erased, blue for recently added sentences, green for sentences I feel unsure about, etc.
I would like to migrate these texts to an outliner (Legend, Workflowy, ….) because editing in an outliner has certain advantages over a traditional Word editor. But since Workflowy is markdown it can’t “read” the colored text and just makes it all black… Which would make migrating such a pain, that it’s better for me to just stay in Microsoft Word.

There are other advantages as well, of course… Imagine the ease of use if you could easily write something in Legend, using color to format your text, than move it to Word – retaining your exact colors – and then moving it again to Legend if you need to.

This will never be possible when you stick to Markdown. 🙂