5.13 Fields Used to Identify Various Kinds of Notes  ↑

5.13.4 Text Format

A field definition may have a type of text-format (or textformat), and this type may be assigned implicitly or explicitly.

A field definition may have a label of Text Format, in which case its type, if unspecified, will default to text-format.

This sort of field can only be added to a Collection through direct editing of the Collection Template File, and not through access to the Collection Settings.

A Collection is not expected to have more than one field of type text-format.

The text format field is meant to allow a Note to have its Body field treated as Plain Text, rather than Markdown.

This can be useful, for example, if some Notes have text meant to be edited using the Bike Outliner app, or some other app that relies on leading white space on a line to indicate indentation.

Such a field type can be added to a Collection by modifyings its Collection template file to include a line something like the following:

	Text Format: <text-format>

As always, be sure to Reload the Collection after making changes to the Collection template!

Note that Text Format values are not stored as metadata within a Note, but are instead reflected in each file’s file extension.

Notes with a Text Format of Markdown are stored with whatever file extension was specified in the Collection Settings for the Collection as a whole.

Notes with a Text Format of Plain Text are stored with a file extension of txt.

(Note that, if you wish to use this sort of field, you should not specify txt as the general file extension to be used for the Collection as a whole.)

Notes marked as Plain Text will not have their body values run through a Markdown parser, but will instead be displayed as-is, within starting and ending pre tags, to indicate that the text is preformatted.