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Bold and Italic Have Arrived In WorkFlowy

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January 22, 2014

bold-italic

Although we feel bad bankrupting all the people who bet all their savings that WorkFlowy would never get formatting (including my own dear mother (sorry Mom!)), simple formatting has arrived.

You can now use bold and italic in WorkFlowy. There are a few details I should mention: You can use the same shortcuts you normally use to start typing in bold and italic, namely, control/command+b and control/command+i. And you can highlight text and format it with those same shortcuts.

That is about it. We are hard at work trying to make WorkFlowy better for you, and we hope you enjoy bolding and italicizing your WorkFlowy documents.

Note for color lovers: We will probably let you choose colors for tags at some point, and maybe even let the tag affect formatting of the whole item. Not sure when it will happen, but we like the idea.

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df
df
8 years ago

Another request for larger font sizes on iPad here. Steve Jobs wore glasses for distance viewing, not for close reading, so maybe he wasn’t that interested in hyperopia.

Alexander Romanov
Alexander Romanov
8 years ago

Keyboard shortcut for Emoji (Command ⌘ +Control ^ + Space) in Mac OS doesn’t work 😕
Could you please correct this?
Thanks!

Kip Niswonger
8 years ago

Developers… Please Read This…

I have… JUST ONE REQUEST…. GIVE US AN OPTION TO “ADJUST FONT SIZE ON ALL TEXT”

Being Older… this would help me in seeing it on my iPad and iPhone.

I WOULD DUMP ALL MY OTHER TODO APPS if…. I could make your text bigger… Smaller text for those of us who can’t see as well as we could in our youth… makes the app unusable for a ToDo app.

Suddenly… the app would be the only app used for task lists.

Hope you read this… Kip

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
8 years ago
Reply to  Kip Niswonger

Hi Kip. Thanks for the thought. Yeah, good point! Will add it as a high priority.

Raine
8 years ago

Consider adding monospace formatting option, similarly to bold, italic and underline.

Like this:comment image?dl=0

Paul Smith
Paul Smith
9 years ago

Acknowledging the balance sought between keeping things simple and adding usability, here is one feature request that I have not seen mentioned yet in this thread– Incorporating some pre-configured formatting styles into the available themes.

For example one theme might automatically make Level 1 entries in a current list view bold 14 pt text, Level 2 entries bold 12 pt text, Level 2 entries italics 11 pt text, Level 4 and below normal font, etc.

This would not add any new buttons or complexity to the end user– it would just be an optional theme they could choose to use. When I’m viewing several open nested lists, having some formatting to visually organize what is on the page would be useful.

Weston Tobias
Weston Tobias
9 years ago

Hello, how do I use the bold and italics features on the android app? Thank you.

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  Weston Tobias

Unfortunately you can’t yet. Sorry!

frankman777
frankman777
9 years ago

iOS apps now have underline!!… so at least with iOS, desktop and web apps, you can go crazy and underline without anything reverting back! Any word on the Android app yet?

spolsky
spolsky
9 years ago

Cool! Looks like underline has been added – CTRL+U.

frankman777
frankman777
9 years ago
Reply to  spolsky

Yes.. that is awesome!… But I don’t think it will be announced until the iOS app (at least) comes up to speed… because you can use the underline feature right now on Web/ Desktop… but as soon as the iOS app updates, underline can’t be assimilated from the desktop changes… and what happens is that, when in turn, the desktop app syncs, the underline formatting is undone. So… don’t go wild with your formatting changes across your lists yet… if you are an iOS user.

Frank
Frank
9 years ago

I would use color sparingly… just for task items. Workflowy would then be able to fully adapt Kanban principles – in that color helps to visualize work flow a heck of a lot easier.

Sven B.
Sven B.
9 years ago

Please keep the style of workflowy plain and simple. I love the clean UI and the focus on making lists. Ain’t it all about brain organizing, nothing more?! I’ve tried so many super structured apps like evernote, wunderlist, todoist (was simple in the beginnings), trello, kanban, GTD and so on but only workflowy convinced me because of it’s simplicity and it’s extreme flexibility.

You’ve done a great job, really!

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  Sven B.

Thanks! Yeah, we will always keep it plain and simple, and we will add features in that same way.

jjprevite
9 years ago

YAYAYAYAYAY! Thank you so much, Workflowy Team!

Johny Why
9 years ago

love workflowy, but please don’t ruin workflowy by turning it into a word processor. The behavior is love is AUTOFORMATTING, based on structure. i don’t want a bunch of formatting buttons cluttering my interface, and i don’t want to destroy the readability of my content structure with arbitrary formatting.

thx

Sven B.
Sven B.
9 years ago
Reply to  Johny Why

Absolutely right!!!

Christoph Dollis
Christoph Dollis
9 years ago

You’ve finally added bold and italics!

What a delightful addition.

Christoph Dollis
Christoph Dollis
9 years ago

Some of us find black on white text to be highly readable compared to colors. I hope the tag”s changing the colouring of an item will be optional!

(Triply vital if one is using a UserStyle.)

kohpyreit
kohpyreit
9 years ago

Please add the possibility to create links between notes, that can be done in a simple way without adding strain to the gui I think and would greatly enhance organizational efforts. Otherwise, great product!

cjrademaker
cjrademaker
9 years ago

I use workflowy every day for note taking in my college classes, there are two major hangups however that make things difficult and limited

First, the ability to insert images, my notes for any class that requires graphs and tables such as calculus and economics would become much more useful if I could simply copy and paste an image in

Second, a wider support for special characters, The only class I am unable to use workflowy for is formal logic (and boy would I love to), because it requires a number of special characters such as the turnstyle, double turnstile, left and rightfacing U, etc.

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  cjrademaker

yeah, we’d like to support images and attachments generally. it seems like a general and useful feature.

also, yeah, special characters & math (maybe latex, etc) would be great.

samsin
9 years ago
Reply to  Jesse Patel

Images would be awesome. The lack of that feature makes choosing between Workflowy (hierarchical, big picture) and Trello (flat but great for referencing ideas) difficult at the moment.

Oleksandr Vasiliev
9 years ago
Reply to  Jesse Patel

There is a simple solution for math – MathJax. And it definitely could be great to have that capability.

Markdown support is also the way to go: you add basic formatting capabilities without changing interface at all (you can also include figures by url with markdown). On the other hand, both features might be hard to implement on mobile.

edyzon
edyzon
8 years ago
Reply to  cjrademaker

Yes, symbols from formal logic would be GREAT! Quantifiers etc. .. please please please?

George Cochrane (@georgecochrane)

Colors would be awesome! If you do this, please consider allowing for both font colors and background colors in your spec for the color tag. Background colors make navigating large sets of text-based data extra-extra easy. I tend to use them for status, degree of doneness, and a host of other important stuff. It’s great to be able to know important things about what you’re scrolling past, without even reading a word.

Sven B.
Sven B.
9 years ago

Hope not!!!!

johny radio
9 years ago
Reply to  Sven B.

Plz don’t ruin the app with clutter. Workflowy’s uniqueness is not formatting, it’s structure.

Johan Deknudt
Johan Deknudt
9 years ago

maybe a simple marker tool that puts the selected text in a pale colour by using “Ctrl+E”

Ahmad Al-Aissa
Ahmad Al-Aissa
9 years ago

It’s amazing how happy can people be with a feature from the 90s, thank you workflowy team for making your website less retarded.

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  Ahmad Al-Aissa

Haha. 90s? I bet the first Mac had bold/italic, no?

Sasha Ilinsky
9 years ago

What about well-designed line-spacing?

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  Sasha Ilinsky

If you have suggestions for spacings, we’d welcome them! We are definitely not typographers.

johny radio
9 years ago
Reply to  Jesse Patel

Full-justified always looks cleaner than left-aligned, which looks all jaggy.

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Rob Cherny
9 years ago

This is fantastic. I would love Markdown type support also, but it may be a bit esoteric for some people (I realize that goes contrary to the notion of markdown being “humane” but I’ve seen tons of mangled MD docs out there).

One thing — and I guess I should have added this under “Other” on the feature vote — while we speak about things like date support — what if the implementation was more generic and it just supported “values” with tags like Taskpaper? @date(2014-01-24) and the search operators supported queries on those value?

Hmmm I guess that could be esoteric too, lol

Puneeth Gaurav
Puneeth Gaurav
9 years ago

one of the best app for me as I seen ever

Maria Greene
9 years ago

And there was much rejoicing!

Mike Smith
9 years ago

Nice feature for use on the desktop, unfortunately inaccessible in smartphone browsers? (At least Chrome on Android…)

edmullen Mullen
9 years ago

Thanks for the feature. In the future it’d be cool if you added support for the markdown versions so you could just type *italic word* or **bolded word** and the style would be updated accordingly. On mobile that’s a bit more direct.

But thanks, I LOVE Workflowy!

Dominic
Dominic
9 years ago

What? No underline? 😉

Dominic
Dominic
9 years ago
Reply to  Dominic

Oh.. is that because of links that are underlined? You guys think of everything.

Johan Deknudt
Johan Deknudt
9 years ago

I didn’t realy see the use of it. Because I like to keep things thin and straight. :p
I’ll guess I’ll see where it takes me.

Tabitha
Tabitha
9 years ago

Great feature. Any progress on the issue where the letter ‘n’ can not be typed in the Chrome App. It’s getting very frustrating. (It’s been at least …a week?)

David
David
9 years ago

Amazing! Just in the last few days, for example, having my plan of action in Workflowy has allowed me to juggle a load of things without getting confused. My life has been made way easier because of you guys. Thanks a lot.
Especially looking forward to using Bold lettering.

Joe Nicholson
Joe Nicholson
9 years ago

This is great!! I love WorkFlowy. This simple clean feature enhances it elegantly.

Pishabh Badmaash
9 years ago

I am loving this so much

Mak Sim
Mak Sim
9 years ago

This is great feature:-) Thank you.
Different colors, IMHO, would be too much, though.

Sharon
Sharon
9 years ago

I’m very excited, thank you! And what’s even more special is that I sent this in as a suggestion back in 2011 and WorkFlowy actually sent me a reply to that original email to tell me it’s now available. That tells me they do keep all our suggestions. Good going, WorkFlowy!

Dr. L (@bliang17)
9 years ago

I think password for WorkFlowy app on iOS would be a fantastic idea.

Miguel
Miguel
9 years ago

Is this supposed to work when loading as a chrome app? Right now it’s not working for me. It works if I load it directly in Chrome, though.

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  Miguel

The Chrome app has to update for it to work. We pushed out an automatic update last night, so it should work. Maybe try closing and re-opening?

Miguel
Miguel
9 years ago
Reply to  Jesse Patel

Ok, I had to restart both the Chrome app and Chrome itself but that did the trick. Thanks!

Thomas
Thomas
9 years ago

you never expected this question, did you? When will this work using the iPad app?

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  Thomas

It already works on iOS 7. Just highlight a word, hit right arrow in the thing that comes up and there are bold/italic controls. I should add this to the post.

bookiewookie
9 years ago
Reply to  Jesse Patel

Any chance you will have a version that works with our legacy iPads that only go to IOS5?

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  bookiewookie

No, sorry :/ The tools used to build it don’t exist on those versions of iOS. I actually have an original iPad, so I’m in the same boat.

Stefan
Stefan
9 years ago

Thanks for implementing this feature. WorkFlowy rocks!!

Simon JB
Simon JB
9 years ago

It doesn’t work in Firefox (at least my french version), where both ctrl+i and ctrl+b open the bookmarks sidepanel !
Works perfectly in Chrome however.

Would it be technically possible to preserve the bold / italic formatting when I copy some text from a website or a word document into workflowy ?

tektrader
tektrader
9 years ago

I appreciate the effort put into keeping Workflowy simple. I have been a paying customer for almost a year. But I find the tone in your message jarring: the flippant tone, the glee in denying users features.

Instead, tell us how you see Workflowy evolving and why. Tell us more about how you use it.

Jesse Patel
Jesse Patel
9 years ago
Reply to  tektrader

Hrm, sorry about that. I have edited the post a a little in response, cause maybe the tone was a little off. To be clear we aren’t denying users features, and we don’t take joy in it, it just takes a long time and a lot of work to build them. We have a long list of great features we would very much like to provide our users.

James
9 years ago
Reply to  Jesse Patel

Don’t worry, I think most of us like the tone and get it. It’s refreshing to get something free from corporate-ese.

Laura
Laura
9 years ago
Reply to  Jesse Patel

Your tone is fine – and I’m one of those extra-sensitive people, like tektrader, apparently. Thanks for adding bold and italics!

Joe
Joe
9 years ago
Reply to  tektrader

I suggested bolding in my reply to your email when I first joined 9 months ago; your response was just “You can’t even do that in the pro version yet!”, I found that a little arrogant.

Corey Martin
9 years ago

Thanks for adding this! Being able to include visual cues will be extremely helpful.

Jean-Baptiste Dayez
9 years ago

What is really cool is that it does not affect the user experience because no button has been added. Thanks!

Vadim Vasiliev
9 years ago

Thanks a lot!

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