Exclude Markdown marks (esp. link urls) from Character Count

[rleiro]

Hi! How is it going on?

I’m new to Supernotes, and I’m enjoying it so far.

Just providing feedback: the character counter is counting the characters that make the Markdown link to websites, which makes no sense to me. For example:

[xxxxxxxxxxxxx] (yyyyyyyyyyyy)

In the example, the counter should consider only the X, never the Y.

Happens in all Windows devices I have.

Ty for the attention, and good luck to the project and the community!

[tobias]

Hi @rleiro,

Welcome to the Supernotes Community, really happy to hear you’re enjoying the experience!

Thanks for opening this! Totally makes sense, this has been mentioned previously by @joplin6167 and others as well:

@joplin6167

2. WYSIWYG cards and character count
Already mentioned by others. I’d also like it if the character count was more “WYSIWYG” – for example, if I link a card, it’ll use about 50 more characters than expected because of the UUID for each card, and if I write some LaTeX, each use of “operatorname” (or something similar) adds a lot more characters than one actually sees on the screen. I find Supernotes’ emphasis on small cards very helpful for organizing my thoughts, so it makes me sad when I see “2 cards” in red due to lots of links or LaTeX.

The character count should also exclude all the Markdown marks as well, such as ** or ==. I’ve renamed this and moved it into feature requests as it’s more of an improvement than a bug. We will up the priority of this, and hopefully get something out soon!

[connor]

Another way to think about the current system is as a “complexity count” rather than a “character count”. The goal of the system on Supernotes is not to nickel-and-dime people on content, but broadly to encourage breaking up long/complex content into smaller chunks, for various benefits (synthesis, organization, collaboration, etc).

Viewed in this light, it makes sense that a link would count as more characters, as it is a more “complex” structure than just plain text. A card with 100 links is very different from a card with 100 normal sentences.

Also remember that there is a soft-limit and a hard limit. The soft limit can be safely ignored – it is just a gentle nudge and you will probably hit it quite frequently with extended use of Supernotes. The hard limit is 10x the soft-limit, and hopefully you will never hit that limit due to link text counting against the allotment. If you do, it would probably be best to split that content up anyway.

We are already working on a system to better interact with links, so hopefully that will ameliorate this issue, albeit a bit indirectly.

[rleiro]

I have some problems with this idea:

• Practical references could count as complexity. If I create a link to the Art. 1° of the Brazilian Constitution, is this considered complexity?
• Even if a simple reference could be considered “complexity”, why shouldn’t the user be responsible for handling this idea? (He should?)
• The physical size of the link would have a direct relationship with the idea of complexity, which does not make sense.

Indeed, It’s an interesting discussion… but at first glance, I think I prefer the idea of these things to be part of the user creativity, instead of the design of the program. But it’s your choice, of course.

Ty for the attention.

[cmacphillamy]

Hello, I was wondering if it would be possible to implement a feature that ignores the text from a card link in the word count. By this I mean only count the characters in bold. I.e., GD

[tobias]

Hi @cmacphillamy, welcome to the Supernotes Community!

The question around word / character count has popped up a few times, and I’ve merged your feature request with an existing one. In the past, we had a system where the same card was counted multiple times if you overflowed your 1200 character soft limit, to encourage you to write succinctly. But this ended up causing more confusion so we phased this out.

With these changes, along with our editor becoming more and more feature-rich, esp. with images, it makes sense to see if we can calculate the number of characters that are seen on the screen rather than behind the scenes. However, having a non-accurate character count can also be confusing if you’re using Supernotes to draft something and then it won’t paste into a ‘600 char limit’ textarea for a form you’re filling in. We will see what we can do.

If you’d like this please like @rleiro’s original post so we can gauge additional interest.

[cmacphillamy]

Hi @tobias,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I very much accept your points and it’s unlikely that the characters consumed by the card link are going to be a huge number of the total. At least as far as I can tell from my cards so far.

Thanks again