Export Formatted outputs with runoff lines

I’ve been able to do this successfully in the past, but now the output is weird:

Doing an export of a bullet to Formatted, then copy, paste to blank Word doc. The result is truncated lines. I have attached 3 files to illustrate:

  1. Screenshot 1 shows the text in Dynalist
  2. Screenshot 2 shows how the text looks in the Exporter. Notice the lines run off the pane
  3. The Word doc with the exported, formatted text from DL

Looks like a bug… (one of the few in Dynalist, thankfully!)

DynaList Formatted Export pasted into Word Doc.doc (24.5 KB)

Thanks,
Mark

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation and screenshots!

I took a look at the Word document and it looks like what was in Dynalist. So the bug is with the runoff lines in exported view only?

If I remember correctly, removing text wrapping in export was intentional to fit more lines on the screen. There’s a vertical scrollbar at the bottom that will allow you to see the full line.

Is that a problem?

Sorry for my delay in replying Erica. For some reason, this forum is not sending me email updates with replies. I’ve created another Word DOCX, this time showing what happens when exporting Formatted and also Plain Text, both from Firefox & Chrome.

The problem is this: whatever has been changed with Formatted Export in Dynalist is much worse from a usability standpoint. The formatted export pasted into Word chops words in half, which is bizarre. Meanwhile, Plain Text does not do that.

Please restore the Export Formatted to what it was. The way it is now makes the formatted export useless. i also tested in LibreOffice Writer, ODT document and the same thing happens.

As it stands now we have to go through the pasted in document line by line and fix. Definitely a deal breaker.

Thanks for restoring this important functionality to what it was!

Mark

DynaList Formatted and Plain Text Export on FireFox and Chrome Jan 19 2018.docx (16.5 KB)

I could be mistaken, but I believe that problem with current Formatted Export is that the spaces between words are all non-breaking spaces yielding no “good” break points on a long line and forcing Word/LibreOffice to just break at an arbitrary character.

Mark, I opened this second .docx file in LibreOffice and replaced all non-breaking spaces with regular spaces. After this, I believe the formatting looked as expected.

Perhaps this Find & Replace technique will be easier than your current line-by-line fix until it can be fixed properly in Dynalist.

Thanks for your thoughts, Bryan. It’s still less than ideal. It’s important that the Dynalist developers give us this vital functionality back, sans weird/unorthodox formatting.

I believe that that the presence of non-breaking spaces in your .docx is causing the wrapping oddities observed in Word/LibreOffice. So perhaps the next logical question to ask is why that document has non-breaking spaces.

When I do a Formatted Export of my own lists, I get “regular” spaces and correct wrapping in LibreOffice. However, I just did a test where I intentionally inserted non-breaking spaces into Dynalist and observed that these non-breaking spaces were maintained in the Formatted Export output.

So I suspect that the Dynalist document from which you are exporting contains these non-breaking spaces and the current Formatted Export functionality is simply maintaining these characters as-is. Are you able to test to see if this may be the case? (If so, it’s not clear that the current behavior is incorrect, even if not-so-convenient in your use of the tool. But if we can understand it better, at least then it’s more explicit what behavior is being requested from the Dynalist team.)

Hi @BryanN, thanks for the replies! Nice detective work. :clap:

We did fix a bug where spaces are copied as non-breaking spaces 2 weeks before, so it makes sense that you can’t see the behavior any more (see bug fix #3 in our week #3 update).

@Mark_VanOuse does that solve the issue?

Yes it did, Erica! I confirm that formatted export is pasting well into: Word 2016, LibreOffice Write and Evernote. Super… I rely on this functionality heavily and am so glad it’s back!

Thank you!

1 Like

Super happy to hear!

Marking this as resolved then :slight_smile: