Writing text documents/emails with formatting on an iPad

[AlexDonohue]

Hello all,

A complete iPad newbie here, but I've been given one by work in order to work efficiently on the move. Part of my work involves writing press releases and distributing them via googlemail, either on a dedicated email app, or via safari.

My big problem is that i can't format text in anyway. I need to be able to underline, bold, and change font sizes. I did manage to do this on 'pages' but then every time i copied and pasted the text into the email client all formatting was removed.

Can anyoen think of a solution? I need the text to keep its format when pasted into the email client, or be written in the client with the formatting controls? If I write emails through a computer there are the usual buttons in the client to bold, underline etc.

Happy to buy any apps...is there a 'wordpad' type app?

Thanks

 

[twerppoet]

In iOS 5 you can do some formatting in the email. You select the text you want to change by tap-hold then drag the handles to include what you want. The popup menu has a button to the right that will give you some options, including some rtf controls (but not font size).

The Evernote app has more RTF options, and you can mail notes. In my tests the text goes into the body of the email, and looks good. But again, there is no way to set the text size. At least not on the iPad app. You can do so from the computer app.

The pay for Evernote app offers more features, even the ability to share notes between multiple users. If you are working with the same people all the time you could use this to not only share basic RTF documents between you, but collaborate on them.

You said you were using Pages. You can email a document directly from pages in .doc format. This should preserve your formatting, at least the simple stuff you were talking about. The document will be an attachment, not inline, if that's ok.

I know there are other text apps that can paste RTF into emails, or send their results as an email. I use Essay for this, but it's been discontinued.

 

[twerppoet]

Update.

I was fooling around and discovered that you can change the font size in Evernote. The button that looks like a paragraph break is actually for choosing styles. You get for choices: Section, Subsection, Paragraph, and Block Quote.

They also just updated the app. You can now copy from the when viewing the note then paste into Mail (or wherever). Before you needed to be editing the note to copy and paste. Pasting into mail retains all the formatting, except the font size. Sending the note directly from the app retains all the formatting.

 

[twerppoet]

This problem keeps bothering me, so I keep looking.

I notice that Storyist for iPad does rich text formatting, and it claims to import and export RTF documents.

Might be worth a look.

 

[twerppoet]

Ok, broke down and got the Storyist app for the iPad. For $9.99 it doesn't break the bank, and looks to be worth the price so far.

It is massive overkill for what you want, but you can create a rich text document and export it as an .rtf file; email it as an attachment or send it to DropBox.

It is super customizable, so it should be possible to create a template for your articles that will include the styles and fonts you prefers to use; once you read the manual and get used to it anyway.

You can not copy and paste formatted text to the body of the email, but nothing is perfect.

The only real downside is how much you'll end up wanting the Mac OSX version to go with it (if you own a Mac). At $59.99 I'm probably going to keep using it as a standalone app for some time to come, though I'll probably buy it eventually. Definitely, if I ever tackle a long project. It would be worth it then.

 

[twerppoet]

P.S. That means I'm done banging my head against this problem.

With Evernote for better/easier formatting of RTF emails and Storyist for full documents, I'm satisfied.