Preserve the existing formatting of a response when an annotation is applied or removed.
Requested by Federated Hermes
Current Behavior:
When a user applies an annotation to a response containing multiple paragraphs, bullets, or other formatting, Responsive removes that formatting and combines the response into a single paragraph. The same flattened formatting carries through to the Word export.
Support confirmed that this is currently expected behavior because formatting is not retained when an annotation is applied.
Additionally, if the annotation is later removed, the original formatting is not restored.
Requested Enhancement:
When an annotation is applied to a response:
- Preserve the response’s existing paragraph breaks, bullets, and other formatting within Responsive.
- Preserve that same formatting when the project is exported to Word.
- If an annotation is removed, retain or restore the response’s original formatting rather than leaving the content flattened into a single paragraph.
Business Impact:
Federated Hermes uses annotations specifically so users can add context to responses that carries into the Word export, eliminating the need to manually add comments after export.
With the current behavior, using an annotation creates a different manual step because the user then has to repair the response formatting in Word. This makes annotations less useful for their intended workflow and creates additional work on every annotated response.
The behavior is also not apparent to the user before applying an annotation, and once the formatting is removed, deleting the annotation does not restore it.
Desired Outcome:
Users should be able to annotate formatted responses and export them to Word without the annotation altering the underlying content or creating additional formatting cleanup.
