Feature Request: Rich text in tagging#395

When tagging the inclusion criteria of trials, we found the current the current tagging text box to be pretty limited.

We’d like to request ability to add line breaks and bullet points.

Hi @Dnikitin - we do have you covered on line breaks; hit Shift + Enter simulataneously. We reserve plain Enter for creating the tag, as our power users like avoiding the extra clicks.

As far as bullet lists- I believe it’s common practice to simulate them using plain text (line break + “-“). The upside of the text box containing only plain text is ease of export to other formats (e.g. CSV/spreadsheets trivially store plain text). That said, I don’t want to totally rule out rich text.

Would you use other rich text features (beyond bullet lists)?

Thanks for the request! I’ll note that you can add line breaks using Shift + Enter. Sorry if this is non-obvious, but we wanted to make finishing a tagging line easy so Enter = done and Shift + Enter = new line.

RE: bullet points or other syntax, I hear the need and am interested to hear more about the use case for complex syntax. I tend to tag mostly to reflect the underlying text; do you (or others–feel free to chime in!) use tagging for a more intensive textual description of each underlying piece of evidence?

Hah, parallel minds here Karl :)

Thank you both! Our first instinct was to try Alt +Enter (Excel)

At this time, I think “-“ as bulletpoints would be sufficient. One team member noted that bold would be a nice feature

^I think bolding would be a great feature!

I also wanted to note that sometimes when you’re creating a tag, the highlighted text becomes mushed together without any spaces. When this happens with just a couple of words it’s not really a big deal, but occasionally it happens with an whole paragraph/sentence. Any way to keep this from happening?

Yes - that’s an annoyance I see in about 1/50 PDFs; as far as I’ve dug, it’s a function of 1. the open source PDF rendering library we use (PDF.js) and 2. the letter & word spacing of the PDF. I would like to improve this problem upstream, in PDF.js, but therre may be some hacks we can employ in code we control.