I’d like to enhance the in-game notepad tool to provide the following capabilities:
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Retain all links, formatting, etc when both copying from or pasting to Notepad. To a large extent this is already the case, but there are a lot of cases where this is not done.
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Provide a means to share a note with the rest of your corp via the Notepad window. Perhaps this could be done similar to how Corporation Bookmarks are implemented: with its own folder. I’d imagine that the notes would be read-only to all corp members unless a new role for Note Editing were enabled were members
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Make notes sharable, linkable, and/or itemizable. Maybe something like bookmarks: they can be converted into an item, traded, and the person receiving them could load them
Why bother with the in-game Notepad? Why not just copy and paste onto a different medium such as a webpage, wiki, etc?
Text copied from EVE does not always retain formatting and links, which has many important use cases. CCP doesn’t like to expose the pseudo-HTML that is used underneath, though sometimes we’ve used that as a workaround; unfortunately, that workaround that doesn’t always work. Often times when you paste text into EVE, the pseudoHTML is parsed correctly whereas other times it is interpretted literally as opposed to formatting or as a link - its behavior is inconsistent.
By incorporating all these features, it will be easy to store and share information that needs to retain its formatting and links. Perfect use case: a training syllabus. Many corps have online training syllabi posted on their websites, but few would dispute that they might be more useful if certain content were linkable in game. This is especially true now that we have a Pointer Tool - we would want to have the Pointer links included as part of the syllabus.
With the existing Notepad, creating the Note the way we want it doesn’t make it easy to share. Copying and pasting the text or even using the Copy All feature does not preserve all formatting and links in practice, so pasting it into an EVEmail or conversation breaks a lot of the content. Likewise, certain content, when copied, doesn’t retain all of its formatting and links when pasted into Notepad; I don’t know if this is specifically a Notepad issue or an issue with the clipboard the game uses, but either way one or both would need to be improved in order to address this.
I don’t think these feature enhancements are a lot to ask for, and I don’t think they’re on the verge of feature creep either. I think they would require relatively little effort (compared to all the other improvements being made to EVE) to provide immense utility to an underappreciated tool that could gain substantially more appreciation after these enhancements are incorporated.