Joplin Release Notes

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After much discussion and votes and new logo and icon for Joplin has finally been decided:

In the end, it is an icon relatively similar to the previous one but with a unique style for the "J", which gives it a distinctive look.

Perhaps that's the best way - evolving and cleaning up the icon rather than radically changing it. Another advantage of this icon is that it does not represent any specific object (it's not a note, or notebook), so it does not restrict the scope of the project, which as it grows, is becoming more than just a tool to take notes. …

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We got lots of great contributions for Hacktoberfest 2019, including:

• 48 pull requests opened
• 39 pull requests merged

This year, one small issue is that we got 11 "spam" contributions, as in pull requests that are created only as a way to get a the Hacktoberfest T-shirt. It's not too many, thankfully, but it still makes us lose time as we need to review the code, and sometimes ask questions, to which we get no answer, etc.

On the other hand, the total number of valid pull requests is high, at 48 it's nearly twice as many as last year (we got 26 in 2018).  Many of these are great improvements to Joplin and they will be part of the coming release. …

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The quest for a new Joplin icon continue - first many thanks for the votes and feedback! It definitely helped getting a better sense of what would make a great icon.

Taking all this into account, the remaining candidates are the 5 following icons. The first three were the top voted icons, and the following two are based on the feedback here and on the forum.

Again that would be great if you could vote for your top 2 icons. I expect the winner among these will be the next Joplin icon. Also of course general feedback is welcome too!

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The next version of Joplin will feature support for chemical equations using mhchem for Katex.

For example this mhchem syntax will be rendered as below in Joplin:

$\ce{CO2 + C -> 2 CO}$

///BLOCK_QUOTE_END//////BLOCK_QUOTE_START///

$C_p[\ce{H2O(l)}] = \pu{75.3 J // mol K}$

///BLOCK_QUOTE_END//////BLOCK_QUOTE_START///

$\ce{Hg^2+ ->[I-] HgI2 ->[I-][Hg^{II}I4]^2-}$

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A word form @foxmask, our community manager!

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Hacktoberfest is back this year again for our great pleasure ^^

here are the rules to participate:

To qualify for the official limited edition Hacktoberfest shirt, you must register and make four pull requests (PRs) between October 1-31 (in any time zone). PRs can be made to any public repo on GitHub, not only the ones with issues labeled Hacktoberfest. This year, the first 50,000 participants who successfully complete the challenge will earn a T-shirt.

To participate go to https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/, log in (with you GitHub account) and you are ready to get in. …

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The Joplin icon is going to change soon. The one we have now is something I put together quickly, not knowing if the project would interest someone, so I didn't want to spend too much time on it. Now that the project is more mature, it makes sense to start improving the visuals - first the icon, then the logo font, the website and finally the app UI (although these have already been improved little by little over the past year).

Before picking an icon, I'd be interested to hear about your feedback and whether you have a preference among those below. They all share the same idea - which is something that looks like a note, and that contains a "J" too. …

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Fountain is markup language for screenwriting. Similar to Markdown, it is a lightweight markup format, which allows editing screenplays in plain text.

The desktop and mobile Joplin applications now support Fountain, allowing you to write and read your screenplays on your computer or on the go. To add a Fountain screenplay to a note simply wrap it into a fenced block, with the "fountain" identifier. For example:

\*\*FADE IN:\*\*A RIVER.We're underwater, watching a fat catfish swim along.  

For example, here is Big Fish on mobile:

and on desktop: …

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In Joplin desktop, it has been possible to customise the appearance of your notes using CSS for quite some time.

An issue however is that it is difficult to know what CSS to write and how to select specific elements with CSS. The development tools that were just added allow figuring this out. They are available under the menu Help > Toggle development tools.

Then, from the "Elements" tab, it is possible to select an element and view the corresponding HTML as well as styles. It is also possible to modify the style in real time and view the changes before adding them to userstyle.css. …

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One issue that came up frequently in the forum is that Joplin's data can be very large, especially when the note collection includes many attachments (images, PDFs, etc.). This happens in particular when using the web clipper a lot, as each web page usually has many images included.

The recent versions of Joplin (Desktop, mobile and CLI) attempt to mitigate this issue by providing an option to change how attachments are downloaded during synchronisation.

…

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The latest versions of Joplin adds support for note history. The applications (desktop, mobile and CLI) now preserve previous versions of the notes, so you can inspect or restore them later on as needed.

A common complain with many sync-based note taking apps is that they work in an opaque way - sometimes notes are changed or they disappear and it's not clear why - it could be a user error, or some bug, but regardless it makes it hard to trust the app with thousands of notes. So this feature give transparency over what's happening - if some note seems to be gone or changed when it shouldn't, the redundant data allows investigating the issue and restoring content. …

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Exactly one year ago, on 24 April 2018, the Joplin forum was created as a result of this post on GitHub. Before this, the only way to discuss the project was indeed on the GitHub bug tracker, which is not ideal for general discussion about features, development and so on. …

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The latest release includes two relatively important new features:

The first one, is the addition of several Markdown plugins that enable new features: for example it's now possible to add a table of contents to your notes, to enable footnotes, or to render various text decorations, such as superscript, subscript, highlighting, etc. This was all made possible thanks to the efforts of Caleb John.

…

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The original search engine in Joplin was pretty limited - it would search for your exact query and that is it. For example if you search for "recipe cake" it would return results that contain exactly this word in this order and nothing else - it would not return "apple cake recipe" or "recipe for birthday cake", thus forcing you to try various queries.

The last versions of Joplin include a new search engine that provides much better results, and also allow better specifying search queries. …

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Joplin is now featured on PrivacyTools.io, a site dedicated to providing knowledge and tools to protect people's privacy against global mass surveillance. The app was kindly submitted by Mats Estensen on GitHub and accepted soon after.

Since day one the Joplin project has indeed been concerned with privacy - offering End To End Encryption and supporting open standards, including WebDAV for synchronisation. Setting up Joplin synchronisation can be more complicated than other existing note applications, but the advantage is that once it is done you 100% own the data and even the infrastructure if you use Nextcloud on your own server. …

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Hacktoberfest has now ended - many thanks to all those who have contributed. Some of the pull requests are not merged yet but they will be soon. For information, this is the number of pull requests per month on the project, so there was approximately a 30% increase in October:

Oct - 26

Sep - 20

Aug - 8

Jul - 3

Jun - 4

May - 18

Again many thanks to all those who have submitted a pull request, your efforts to improve the project are much appreciated!

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The Hacktoberfest event has started - it allows you to contribute to Joplin and, at the end of the month, after having done 5 PR, you'll earn a limited edition T-shirt.

To participate, go on https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/ log in (with you github account) and you are ready to get in.

Next, go dive into the Joplin issues list labelled "Hacktoberfest"

We hope you will enjoy that event by contributing to the project which is a nice moment of sharing good vibe 🎃 🎉

PS: the 5 Pull Request don't have to be done only on Joplin project, those can be done on any FOSS projects.

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Reliability and stability is an important feature of Joplin as the application can potentially manage thousands of notes spanning many years (My oldest note, imported from another software, is from October 1999!). A stable interface without too many glitches also makes for a more pleasant user experience. For these reasons, bug fixes are always given high priority in this project, and are usually worked on before any new feature is added. The latest release for instance pretty much only contains bug fixes - eight of them, including one security fix. …

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The new desktop version of Joplin for Windows, macOS and Linux features a new dialog box to view and edit the note properties, such as the updated date, created date, source URL or even location. It's a small change but it can be useful. This dialog can be accessed by clicking on the Information icon in the toolbar.

As usual this release also includes various bug fixes and improvements. More information on the changelog: https://joplinapp.org/help/about/changelog/desktop

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The iOS version for iPhone, iPad and iPod sometimes lags behind the Android one due to the App Store release process being more complex. However it eventually catches up, as is the case with the latest release, which includes all the features and bug fixes from the past few months. …

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One of the most requested feature, the Web Clipper, is now available on the Firefox and Chrome store. It is possible to save a whole web page, or a simplified version of it, or a screenshot directly from the browser to Joplin. Like the rest of Joplin, the HTML page will be converted to Markdown, which means it can be easily edited and read even without a special viewer, and, since it's plain text, it also makes it easier to search and share the content.

Have a look at the Web Clipper documentation for more information.