Secure Notes and Markdown

Stecyk

Is there a way that we can disable Markdown for a Secure Note?

Can we attach a document to a secure note?

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1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided

AGAlumB

@Stecyk: Sorry for the confusion! 1Password X does not have item editing capabilities, and there is no such thing as attachments with 1Password.com accounts anyway. You can, however, upload files as Documents in the 1Password.com web interface, and use Markdown syntax ``` around text you want to remain unmodified. Cheers! :)

Stecyk

Thanks, brenty, for your comment. At your suggestion, I prefixed and ended my text on my Secure Note with ```. The Security Note is still a complete mess. In other words, it fails. My text is altered and is a mess. It is altered because some of my text is interpreted as Markdown. Some valuable characters are no longer visible and the formatting has been screwed up. To say I am disappointed with this enhancement would be an understatement.

Stecyk

My Secure Note looks something like this:

The start of my Secure Note text;
New Line: Lots of text;
New Line: Lots and lots and lots of text;
New Line: Even more text going for several, several rows;
New Line: Ending text

At the very opening and closing, I used ``` . It is a mess.

Stecyk

My only solution NOW is to ignore my Secure Note as presented. Instead, I put it in Edit Mode to see what I had originally. How is this better?

dteare

Hello @Stecyk,

I'm sorry for the frustration. I love the Markdown formatting but I can see how it might get in the way sometimes. The suggestion Brenty made should have been a viable workaround, however, so I thought I would include some screenshots and the data used so we can be sure we're on the same page.

Here's one of my Secure Notes:

When I added three backticks to the beginning and to the end of this note, it changed to this:

Here's the text that I entered in to the secure note:

I used an image as the forum software here supports Markdown and I didn't want it to mange anything.

Is your note formatted similarly? Please let me know and I'll be happy to help more.

++dave;

Stecyk

Hello Dave,

I appreciate you're willingness to help.

Just so we are on the same page, I will be verbose in my description.

I am using my personal computer for editing my 1Password Secure Note.

Steps:

1. Open up the Secure Note that I want to edit
2. At the very beginning of the Secure Note, insert a few blank lines
3. On the top line, type ``` . That is the key on the far left hand side of the keyboard just below the ESC key. It is repeated three times to designate pre-formatted text.
4. At the very bottom of the Secure Note, insert a few blank links.
5. Similar to Step 3, at the very bottom type ```.

In theory, we should have marked everything in between the top and bottom lines as pre-formatted text. My problem ought to be solved.

Now, when I go to my iPhone X and look at the Secure Note's contents, they are a mess. One item has been treated as though it were a title because it begins with a hash mark. Other stuff has been altered to form italics, and other stuff is in red texted boxes. If I were to pore over the stuff, I suspect I would find missing characters because they are being used as interpret Markdown.

I have done just as you have done in your example. I have on the first and last lines the pre-formatted text code. I even left several spaces after the code on the first and last lines. So everything in between ought to be treated as pre-formatted text and left unaltered. Unfortunately, that is not the situation.

I'd love to post my example, but that would not be wise.

My only solution is the put the Secure Note into Edit Mode. Then I can see my note as I had intended. I just need to be careful that I don't make an edit.

Kevin

dteare

Thanks for the update, Kevin.

There must be something unique in your note contents that cause the triple backtick trick to fail. I know you don't want to publish your note here but perhaps you could duplicate your note and delete parts of it until it works as expected? The other alternative is to email me your note directly at dave at 1password dot com.

++dave;

Stecyk

Hello Dave,

My note is long and complex at about 170 lines. It contains a lot of important stuff, keys to my magic kingdom.

What I could try and do is redo my Secure Note with other dummy data. I can leave some of the troublesome characters in. I know that they are troublesome because the formatting changes at those locations. And then, once I have a dummy Secure Note that fails just like my real Secure Note, I can forward it to you.

You will have to allow me some time to create this dummy note.

Thank you for your quick response.

Kevin

Stecyk

Hello Dave,

I was able to create a much smaller file that exhibited the same problems. I will send you an email momentarily.

Kevin

AGAlumB

@Stecyk: Hmm. Maybe we're just talking about different things. What are the OS and 1Password versions you're using? You left that information blank in your original post.

We are evaluating ways to make it possible to actually disable Markdown, but I'm not sure when or what form that might take. So for now, you could use preformatted text as described above to avoid formatting, and Dave and I are doing and suggested. With some more information, perhaps we can figure out what's different about what you're doing/using.

One thing I do see occasionally is unexpected results due to odd characters being used, often due to copying and pasting from another source. An * or whatever may look the same to your eyes, but to the computer there are many different character codes and encodings that may be used, which could behave differently, especially across platforms. Rather than leaving "troublesome characters" in, I bet if you recreate the content yourself rather than copying and pasting you may actually get a different result.

I'm not seeing anything in the inbox from this address. Could you post the Support ID you received?

Stecyk

Hello brenty,

Key Data
- Windows 10 Pro 17134.285
- 1Password for Windows Version 7.2.580
- UltraEdit Text/Hex Editor (x64) Version 25.20.0.72
- iPhone X O/S 12.0
- 1Password for iPhone Version 7.2

Let's address the rest of your concerns.

Strange or unseen characters at the front?

No, when I ran through my exercise with Dave, I went to an existing Secure Note. I then added a few blank lines at the top and bottom of the Secure Note. I then manually typed the preformatted text characters directly from the keyboard to the first and last lines.

Could I type my entire Secure Note without copying and pasting?

No. My Secure Note is 170 lines approximately. Many of those lines contain High ANSI characters. So I have no desire to type 170 lines of long text into a Secure Note on an iPhone. I much prefer a keyboard on my personal computer. And second, I am not even sure how I can create certain characters on an iPhone. I will continue to create my lengthy and complex secure notes using a text editor, and then copy and paste the note into 1Password Secure Note. Accuracy is important to me. So I don't want to screw things up by typing manually. And as mentioned, I doubt that I could even type my notes directly using my iPhone.

I will be sending my email to you very shortly. The note will contain three screenshots and one text file (DaveTeare.txt). I just sent the email to Dave (again) and to support.

I just received a response titled " [#GYV-95877-511] Secure Note & Markdown".

Thank you for your continued interest and help.

Kevin

Stecyk

brenty, I should add that I would very much appreciate a better way to disable to Markdown. A switch to disable Markdown would be fantastic. On page where you allow users to specify tags and other parameters, I would appreciate seeing a Boolean operator for Markdown. Use Markdown on this page? True or False.

AGAlumB

@Stecyk: I think we're on the same page there. Thanks for the feedback. It's definitely on our radar. We just want to make sure we don't make all the folks who want this feature unhappy too — or cause confusion for people. :)

Regarding the Notes/Markdown issue, I've been able to reproduce it thanks to the information you sent. Thank you! This seems to be a Windows text encoding issue, but we'll see what we can do to work around that.

ref: GYV-95877-511, OPW-2412

Stecyk

@brenty, thank you for your investigation and reporting back.

With regard to Markdown, I suspect (read, hope) you'll want to do both now. Some users will want the ``` solution. Myself, I would prefer to be able to use Boolean operator for the entire page. I don't necessarily want or need pre-formatted text, but I need to avoid Markdown on this specific Secure Note. Still, I can see others who might have a mixture of pre-formatted and Markdown text on their Secure Notes.

AGAlumB

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. We're really leaning toward having a global preference enabling/disabling Markdown because having that on a per-item basis is a recipe for confusion (and also an opportunity for bugs). Having the Markdown interpreter either on or off completely avoids all of that. Certainly some people would rather have a per-item option, but then again some people want a per-item option for a lot of things and that just doesn't scale. It's something we'll continue to evaluate, as it's not set in stone, but I do think that's a good middle ground that doesn't cause undue confusion. Everyone understands a light that's got an off/on switch. It quickly gets messy when the switch is connected to an outlet that may or may not have power, be on a timer, multi-way bulbs, etc. :lol: