Using Evernote with Drafts

Integration Guides
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#1

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Evernote is a popular note platform. Drafts can capture text to Evernote in a number of ways.

Evernote Action step (iOS Only)

Drafts offers native integration with Evernote using the Evernote action step. Actions using this step can create, replace, append or prepend to notes in any notebook, assign tags, etc…even convert Markdown to Evernote rich text. Some ready to use samples from the directory:

  • Save to Evernote: Saves draft to Evernote in a timestamped note, converting Markdown to Evernote’s native ENML rich-text format.
  • Append to Evernote Journal: Append draft to rolling monthly journal notes in Evernote.
  • Evernote with Todos: Saves to Evernote converting Drafts’ [ ] task marks to Evernote checkboxes.
  • Save to Evernote (Text): Same as save action above, but treats text as plain text converting line breaks, but not applying any Markdown formatting.

Formatting: see the formatting footnote below to better understand how text is converted to Evernote.

Mac Note: Evernote does not provide a standard REST API, so these actions rely on a custom SDK from Evernote. Evernote does not offer a similar SDK for Mac at this time, so these features are not enabled.

Share Extension (iOS Only)

Evernote offers an iOS Share extension for creating tasks which can be used with the Drafts’ Share action. This requires no special setup or configuration, just that both apps be installed on the device. Just tap the “Share” action, and use select Evernote. The share extension offers great flexibility in assigning Evernote tags and destination notebooks.

Mac Note: Note that Evernote does have a share extension in their Mac application, but it does not accept text for some reason, so does not appear as an option when sharing from Drafts. This is something Evernote would have to change at their end to function with Drafts.

URL-Based Actions (iOS Only)

Evernote supports URL schemes, including x-callback-url.

  • New Note in Evernote: Sends the current draft to Evernote as a new note, with the first line of the draft as the title and remaining text as the content of the note.

Mac Note: Evernote’s Mac app does not implement support for the same URL schemes as their iOS app. They do register the same Evernote: URL scheme, but the action do not work, so generally if you run a URL-based Evernote action on the Mac, the Evernote app will launch, but nothing will happen.

Emailing into Evernote

Evernote offers the ability to email notes. Details about how to email to Evernote are available in their documentation. Once you determine your unique Evernote email address, you can configure a Drafts’ Mail action step with that “To” email address and “Send in Background” enabled for a quick, single tap method to send a note to Evernote.

This is generally the best option for integrating with Evernote on the Mac.

AppleScript (macOS Only)

It is also possible to do advanced creation and modification of notes in Evernote via AppleScript integration. We have posted a sample action demonstrating how to create cross-platform Evernote actions with AppleScript.

Formatting Text for Evernote

Evernote stores notes using it’s own ENML markup, which is very much like HTML. When displayed in Evernote’s apps, the ENML is rendered much like HTML is in a web-browser to appear as rich-text…but, ultimately, under the hood, it is stored in this HTML-like markup.

Drafts edits plain text notes. When sending text from Drafts to Evernote using their APIs, the text has to be converted to ENML. Drafts offers several strategies to do this, as controlled by the template output format of the Evernote action step. The two common options are:

  • Text: Using this option, Drafts assumes you want your output treated as plain text. It will encode HTML entities, add line break tags where you have them, etc., when sending to Evernote. It will not, however, result in any rich-text formatting in Evernote. If you do not use Markdown, this is probably the option you want.
  • Markdown:: Using this option, Draft will run the output through your preferred Markdown parser to convert it to HTML before sending to Evernote. Since ENML is very close to HTML, this generally works to get nice rich-text formatting of bold, italics, lists, links and other common markup in the resulting Evernote document.
1 Like
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#2

Is it possible to add a list of pros and cons for each method to aid in choosing one? Thanks! :doughnut:

#3

Is it possible to modify “Append to Evernote Journal” so that it converts Markdown into proper format for Evernote, like “Markdown to Evernote” action?
…
Never mind, I figured out how to Edit the action and change it from Text to Markdown.

#4

Like most users, I have many (in my case 300 + notebooks) in evernote.
Perhaps useful to mention that only new note in evernote allows the user to choose in which notebook the note is inserted, whereas save to evernote just sends the newly created note to the all purpose ‚non classified‘ dumpster, forcing the user to open evernote the move the move into the appropriate note sometime in the future, a laborious task.
For this reason, IMO using New Note is a no brainer.

#5

Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but I was wondering whether it is possible to change the Evernote note title from the date/time as it is now to the first line/heading 1 of the Draft?

Thanks

Jim

#6

Yes, it mentions this in the original post above.

Assuming that you are now referring to this action, you would change the noteTitle definition from [[time]] to [[title]].

You can find documentation for these points as follow:

Hope that helps.