⚡️ Ideas
Santi Younger Santi Younger Mar 16, 2023

Long-form writing in Tana

Explain the problem as you see it

At the moment, it is not possible to write essays, emails, blog posts, or other long-form content in Tana in a smooth way. Although Tana works great for outlining ideas, it would be incredible to have a dedicated mode that allows long-form writing options.

Options such as:

  • Headings
  • Line breaks
    (just these 👆 two things would make a massive difference)
    nice bonuses would be:
  • Quote blocks
  • Lists (numbered and bulleted)

Why is this a problem for you?

Since Tana currently lacks support for long-form writing, we are forced to use other tools for writing long-form content.

This makes it hard to continue the work all in Tana. It prevents us from having all research, outlines, and drafts in the same app.

Workarounds

The best workaround so far is Jeff Harris' CSS hack. Which was posted here in the slack community
Edit: Unfortunately that post 👆 was lost in Tana's community slack history, and even then that css hack isn't working anymore.

After reading the comments below this post, I wanted to share a bit of how I'm working around Tana's limitations, in case anyone find it helpful, you can see me showing a demo of my current workflow in this YouTube video

At the moment I rely on a lot of workarounds, having a better system built in to Tana to specially allow line-breaks and headings (h1, h2, h3...) would be great.

───────────────

While Markdown syntax would be incredible, the most important aspect of this feature would be the ability to easily paste long-form text into other apps like Gmail and preserve all formatting.

Similar requests:

As pointed out below in the comments, there's a similar request here: https://ideas.tana.inc/posts/26-line-breaks-inside-a-node
While that's definitely super useful by itself. I would argue that it's important to go beyond just "line breaks inside nodes" and also have a dedicated "long-form" writing mode that enables not only line breaks but also headings, lists, blockquotes, and other formatting options for an overall better long-form writing experience outside of enforced bullet point structures.

Thanks 🙏

⁨42⁩ ⁨Comments⁩

In reply to Maciej Smoła Maciej Smoła

Thanks, Maciej. Line-breaks are definitely an element of it. However, I would argue that it's important to go beyond "line breaks inside nodes" and also have a dedicated "long-form" writing mode that enables not only line breaks but also headings, lists, blockquotes, and other formatting options for an overall better long-form writing experience outside of enforced bullet point structures.

But I think that's a good request too. Thanks.

Santi, thank you for making this post. Tana is an excellent way to organize projects, but more technical or conceptual projects often require longer form notes and explanations, in addition to longer form journaling or idea organization.

Clear headings are the only thing that I can say is missing from Tana which would be instrumental in completing Tana's functionality as a project and idea management tool.

LogSeq and Roam as outliners are similarly not intended for long form but their markdown syntax makes organizing longer form notes in outline style a breeze, with the option to use line breaks and clear sectioning of text with headings. That's what makes those apps usable as a one app solution in my opinion, and is the only thing Tana need to be a one app solution for me!

There are certainly ways to organize with nodes and tags, but when it comes to longer form ideas and concepts, we would seriously benefit from being able to enlarge and embolden text to use as headings!

In reply to AVGVSTVS AVGVSTVS

Hey! I'm definitely glad I'm not alone in this. I definitely face times where it makes more sense to keep a long-form text in Tana, but I can't due to the lack of long-form text support. For me it's okay if Tana doesn't turn out to be the best long-form text editor, but its current limitations can break one's workflow unnecessarily. I really hope this feature comes to Tana soon. Thanks for sharing your take on it

This is also the reason why my Content Hub is still currently housed on Notion. But if Tana adds this long-form writing feature, I'm keen to work on all things content via Tana!

Paragraph view with Nodal Sentences
I think it was either Tarjei or Olav who mentioned in Q and A the reason for their resistance to enacting this feature.
They basically felt the data structure of nodes was incompatible with the idea of paragraphs, that nodal data structures made more sense at the level of a sentence.
I think however you should still be able to create a solution that supported both outcomes.
A view/edting mode that parses sentences into nodes and allows them to be viewed in either paragraph or nodal modes.

Paragraph View
This is node one. This is node two. This is node three.

Nodal View

  • #Par Break
    • This is node one
    • This is node two
    • This is node three

You would have to think about how you would deal with child nodes
i.e.
Nodal View

  • Par Break
    • This is node one
    • This is node two
      • This is node two B
    • This is node three

**Paragraph View **
This is node one. *This is node two. ...

  • This is node two B
    ... This is node three.

But these issues are not insurmountable. That way you get the best of both worlds. Node=Sentence and Paragraph view. And maybe it would mean Tana were more likely to implement.
Best N

In reply to Nathan Price Nathan Price

I like it when service providers get us the results we want.
We help people build relationships with providers who are improbable to resist you when you want a software feature and that feature can be created.
We help people manage content as usefully as they like.

In reply to Nathan Price Nathan Price

Excellent idea! Similar to your suggestion you can also think of a "Page View" and "Node View" option for each node, but where in "Page View" each child node turns into a "block" similar to what we know from tools like Notion.

In reply to Nathan Price Nathan Price

https://www.notion.so/help/writing-and-editing-basics
This page explains well the concept of blocks in Notion. The tension between blocks and pages seems to be the eternal quest of every tool (see for example this video) and I hope that the Tana team can come up with a suitable solution once and for all. "Everything is a node" is a good start, but we really need a solution for long-form writing, including inserting images and embeds for Tweets, PDFs, Google Maps, etc. 🙏

I really need to improve the readability of the tana page, that is, the style.

I hope that tana can support simple markdown syntax and provide users with some preset block usage (just like notion, anytype, capacities). Provide presets such as time, quote, code, separator style, todo, etc.

In reply to Rudolf Nanne Rudolf Nanne

Wow, that's exactly what I was thinking.
I also hope that, through this way, I can solve the problem of not knowing when to create a new page or continue writing on the current page.

Maybe taking some idea's from Tiddlywiki (https://tiddlywiki.com/) - the title is the node ID, but all nodes have a text block. Maybe, a keyboard shortcut, cntr + return toggles the initial text as the title and then move the cursor into a markdown block. Key will be allowing on the fly interpretation from a user experience point of view.

In reply to Noel Faux Noel Faux

I've just been trying to find a work around for diagrams and came to this site to search if anyone had suggested mermaid support - definitely would help with my workflow and project planning (gannt and flow diagrams are a must!)

I just felt the biggest reason why I would like to have an easier way for long form writing, strictly meaning multiline nodes.

It’s because there is no way to tag many nodes at once in a good fashion.

I would love to create taggable content without the “title node” or without tagging each line of the text. I would like to tag whole “block” of that text, like:

  • multiline poem → #poem,
  • draft of an email/response to question for my online course → #draft,
  • block of text ready to be copied and pasted somewhere else, without “-”, only with simple /newline characters/.