In Highlights, "Roam-like" inclusion of Hierarchy of Text Blocks

[Oshyan]

@B_Sp

You raise a great point - is Fibery based around Blocks in the Rich Text? I actually thought it was, in particular because Highlights draw from what appears to be a “block” as I understand them - and I’m basing this on the two tools out there that seem to have the deepest concept of a “block” - Notion and Roam. For example, in Fibery you can have a reference pick up text that is within this “block” but in another row below if you create your new row by hitting “shift” + “enter,” and not just “enter.” I don’t user Markdown, so perhaps that’s a standard of it, but I know from using Confluence, Wrike, etc. that those tools do not handle text this way.

Someone from the Fibery team would have to answer to be sure, but I don’t think what you describe is dependent on being block-based. Lots of text editors work similarly, and it’s common with web-based WYSIWYG editors at the least, if not old school text apps like MS Word (not sure on the latter, it’s been a long time since I used it! ). Essentially you have “carriage return” and “soft carriage return”. In the former case it creates a full blank line in-between, in the latter case you have text that is more part of the previous paragraph, just on the next line. And the formatting applies to exactly that difference. E.g. bullet points, you can do Shift-Enter for a “soft return” and get multiple lines in a single bullet, or just hit Enter and you get a new bullet. That’s not blocks though, just a convention between different types of “new line”. I may be explaining badly, but hopefully that makes sense.

Similarly you don’t need “blocks” to handle something like the collapsing of contents “inside” a header. You just look for any header of the same or higher level in the text below (e.g. H2 or H1 if you’re looking at collapsing an H2), and then collapse all text up until the next equivalent-or-higher header.

This is different than what Roam does where every paragraph (bullet point) is an individually addressable “unit” which is the “parent” to any that are intended beneath it. This indenting (outlining) explicitly defines a relationship (parentage) between “units” (blocks) of content (mostly text, but in Roam can also be images, etc. of course). I’m sure you know all that, but just laying it out to point out the differences and how similar outcomes can be achieved in different ways…

Anyway, that’s all a bit of a ramble, as I tend to do. More to the point, I don’t think block-based docs are a necessity for achieving what you’re wanting (although I’d love to see block-based for other reason). It may be possible for Fibery to just define some simple rules for text inclusion which would help add context, e.g. “When quoting a sub-level bullet point, include any parent bullets above it in a way that it visually shows other items were excluded” (i.e. not quoting the whole block of bullets, but showing parentage still), or “When quoting a bulleted list item, include at least 2 and no more than 5 bullet items that surround it above and below”, or “When quoting a paragraph, include at least 100 characters before and after”, etc.

So basically it may simply be that an adjustment to how backlink quotes are displayed would address your need.

That said, I have another idea that I’ve recently found great value in as I work more with Discourse, and would probably help with your need as well (though you may prefer the “extended” quoting as you describe). And that is: quotes but with a button you can click to expand the displayed quote in-line. This is a brilliant feature of Discourse that I only recently noticed, and I wish more apps that are doing quoting and linking, etc. had this. Give it a try if you aren’t familiar, it’ll show up in the text I quoted from you above!