I quite agree - I would love to see this implemented. It’s quite useful to highlight an entire paragraph, then draw attention to specific key words or phrases.
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I am using MarginNote right now and there are many notes containing italicized text which I cannot reproduce in notecards. Current choice of emphasis is bold only, which in fact is rarely used and actively discouraged in academic publishing.
What do you think about adding this feature that @Rebs suggested? I.e., Emphasis > Italic
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Hi @mobo ,
The Emphasis is designed for using “recall mode” and the Cloze Anki card. Could you please make it clear that how the Emphasis mode working with academic publishing and how the MN working with academic publishing. It’s amazing for what we think the serious public is based on latex or sth.
Or just mean that Italic is a domain custom.
Regards,
Lanco
Support Team
Thanks for your message. What I mean is that the general rule in professional and academic publishing is that only italics are used for emphasis, not bold. So, in the PDFs that most academics/researchers/journalists/etc are studying with MarginNote, titles, foreign words, passages with words emphasized, etc. — they will almost always use italics, not bold. There is only one level of emphasis: italics.
If we want to make notecards and reproduce the emphasis in the original text (e.g., titles), we need an option for italics. Right now, there is no way to add italics to a notecard in MarginNote, only bold.
The request, then, would be to add two options to the notecard popup menu: Emphasis > Italic and Emphasis > Bold.
@Lanco_Support-Team, is MarginNote still under development?
To be honest, these long lapses in your support communication are quite worrisome.
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Hi mobo,
Well I’m working on it. I can’t give you promise to achieve. But I will try my best. Since this is really a culture difference. I will try to persuade CEO.
On the whole, we hope to get better integrated with academic scenarios. So it‘s possible to perfect this thing.
These days we were working on 3.6 handwriting improvement and quickstart videos. I was exhausted. Sorry for lapses. I still hope the brand new handwriting experience will move you.
Lanco
Regards
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Thanks for the update. FWIW, I never use handwriting recognition and I’m pretty sure that I never will. It’s not a feature that I need. However, I do need the other features that I have asked about — very simple features that I have asked about a number of times, now.
If I may ask, what does an app for “academic scenarios” mean for your team?
Does it mean (1) an app to help students memorize information? Does it mean (2) an app to help academic researchers? Both? How would you define this?
I would say that (1) and (2) are in fact different audiences of users. Memorizing is important for people doing exam prep, but that’s not mainly what researchers are doing. It’s a different activity. Research is not focused on the memorization of existing knowledge. We’re not taking exams. It’s about the production of new knowledge, and that means a different approach to study, a different work process.
I’m not sure what the “cultural difference” is that you’re talking about. FWIW, I have been working at a high-level research university in East Asia for over ten years now. I see how research is conducted by my colleagues here, I work with them and the basic methods are really not significantly different than in the US, UK, or Europe. Research is research. As far as I can see, there is no particular “Asian mode” of research. There are different ideas and theoretical approaches, of course, and people are coming from very different traditions of thought, but the basic methods are the same.
We are today living with the reality of a global market for higher education. Regardless of culture and context, all active researchers are focused on reading, taking notes, writing, and publishing. This includes graduate students writing theses and dissertations, faculty, and many people in industry. But the basic model comes from the university.
If you examine the system of ranking all the research universities in the world, you will discover that the most important factor is the quality and quantity of publications (articles, books, etc.). That’s what academic researchers in all parts of the world are doing: working on those publications. The phrase “publish or perish!” is a truism.
If your company wants to make an app for people doing academic research, then, I would submit that you try to forget about “culture” as it’s really not a relevant factor.
But maybe your company is not interested in this market of academic researchers? I cannot say.
I can say that there are many of us, and there are not enough good tools. That means there is a market opportunity here, for a company that produces the right kind of app. MarginNote is pretty good, but right now I still cannot recommend it to my colleagues.
They will almost always use italics, not bold.
The culture I was just talking about is only within Emphasis fonts. We use bold because it just more often in Chinese characters to use it as an emphasis sign.
I realised in universal research, Latin alphabet always use italics. I must admit that we didn’t clean out a monoblock of time at past to specialise alphabet scenes optimisation. And I think this is an essential thing to solve specially.
In CN market, we pay too much attention to solving students memorisation. Both CEO&Developer Min and I have the vision to make MarginNote adapt to Researching demands. But we are alone. It’s a huge work to achieve.
So we make a compromise. We plan to open any API we could in marginnote 4.0 this summer and give users SDK to optimise export for researcher’s software compatible like DOI in Mendeley. There will also be an expanded UI for plugin. Personally, once I did a little academic when I was at college. I hope the software could do more to help science not only exams.
Regards,
Lanco
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Thanks for your message and clarification.
If you are planning to make MarginNote more open, may I suggest AppleScript? It is fairly standard for macOS apps, and right now MarginNote doesn’t support it at all.
Ideally, MarginNote could provide both an API and support for AppleScript, but I understand it takes time to implement this. One advantage of AppleScript vs. an API for “C” is that you could get more people involved in writing scripts. For plugins or extensions, by contrast, the potential audience of developers is probably much smaller, they will need to sign up with Apple’s Developer Program, etc.
Either way, an API+SDK or AppleScript support would not solve the issue that started this thread: the ability to add italics to text on notecards. So, while it would be good to have a more open version of MarginNote (and I hope you will pursue that), it would not address this particular issue.
It is unfortunate that your team is not in agreement about building an app for researchers, especially since I suspect it would not be much work for your developers to fix some of the issues we’ve been discussing.
3 Likes
The Italic is now supported for Non-Chinese languages emphasis. Please have a try.
Regards
Lanco
Sorry, I don’t see any support for italics. Only bold. Using the latest version, MN 3 3.6.5.
Also, Format > Font > Bold and Format > Font > Italic seem broken.
You can see the difference of Emphasis between Chinese characters and English. We will test and confirm other issues you mentioned.
Regards
Lanco
Format > Font > Bold and Format > Font > Italic in 3.6.5
Font settings only support comment fields.
We just have improved text format function in 3.6.6 beta for all of the Title field, the excerpt field (Highlighted text) and the comments field. Please waiting for the official version.
Regards
Lanco
Thanks, @Lanco_Support-Team.
I upgraded to 3.6.6, but something is odd when I try to italicize text in the excerpt field.
If I select Format > Font > Italic from the menu bar, or Font > Italic from the right-click menu, the text is italicized as expected. However, as soon as I leave the note and move to another one, it reverts back to normal text, with no emphasis. The change doesn’t stick.
We have recurred the issue. Thanks for report. We will try to fix it!
Any update on this?
Reminder: this was reported last October. Sorry to ask, but why is it taking so long to provide 1990s-era WYSIWYG functionality?
Font > Italic
is different from
Right click menu > Emphasis
We did update your request to set the underlining feature to italics, but I realize that what you are following up on is something else, a bug in the font settings, it is not the underlining feature that we are talking about, I have misunderstood, this is obviously a simple bug and we can fix this immediately in the next version!
I didn’t understand the situation before. I thought it was resolved.
WHY HAS THIS ISSUE STILL NOT BEEN RESOLVED???
Is it that difficult to allow normal underline/bold…rather than ‘emphasis’ ?
Bu yhe way the users also need to screen answers in RECALL mode (emphasised words) with ONE CLİCK just like DOC MODE
İt ll definitely makes mind map workflow easier to use