Descriptions

[pmcabinet]

I'm not sure if this is utterly naive (in terms of standard metadata), but is it possible to have any basic text formatting for descriptions?

Almost all my images have a scientific (botanical) name in the description, and the rule is that they are italicised whereas cultivars and variants, common names etc are given in normal type.

Not being able to distinguish can be confusing and just looks wrong.

Should I be looking to use a different method (in iMatch) for noting taxons?

[Mario]

IMatch offers no formatting features in the Metadata Panel or Keywords Panel, because there is no easy or official way to store formatting information alongside the actual metadata values. It's just not worth the effort.

IMatch would have to somehow store a formatted version of the XMP data and the clean version to be stored in the file. Mixing in markup languages like XAML or Markdown is a theoretically possible, but would again require IMatch to store two sets of data for each tag or, at the risk of causing incompatibilities or even breaking the metadata processing of other applications, store XMP text values with embedded formatting instructions.

Not to mention potential issues with XMP metadata modified by other applications, which then no longer matches the separately stored formatted value in IMatch. Or losing the formatting every time IMatch has to re-read metadata because of changes done by other applications.

I have pondered the idea to support Markdown for metadata values, somehow, over the years. But this always ended in a "not worth the trouble" and there are also no corresponding feature requests.

[pmcabinet]

Fair enough. Thank you for the explanation Mario.