This is basically an underpowered Notion aimed at academics (yet doesn't support Safari [1]) and needs a lot more time in the oven. Development seems mostly abandoned. [2]

I'm pretty squarely in the target demographic. I used Notion extensively to collaborate in the past, my wife is a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, I've served professionally as a dissertation editor and writing coach, and I use pelican, a static-site generator, for my personal website.

While briefly exploring Fonio and typing only about 10 sentences, I encountered:

1) Crippling text-entry bugs

2) Nonfunctioning features and baffling omissions

3) Broken UI

=1=

This is the first online notepad that has managed to place letters of the words I was typing out of order. Then I pressed backspace and it deleted not from where my blinking cursor sat but from elsewhere in the line -- probably just another symptom related to the out-of-order typing. This happened three different times!

Fonio dies hard when you return focus to the editor from outside it, even on the same tab, but especially triggerable when switching tabs. I managed to duplicate this behavior enough to create this absurd demonstration: return to tab from this one, click cursor to the end of the line. Press enter. A new line appears, but the blinking cursor stays where it is. Type 'asdf'. The 'a' press appears as expected from the keystrokes (though not at the cursor). The 's' deletes the typed 'a', duplicates the previous line, then puts the 's' at the end of both lines. The 'd' replaces the 's' in the upper line with a 'd'. Finally, the 'f' lands at the start of the upper line.

That behavior was so insane I screencapped two repetitions of it [3].

Pressing 'delete' while at the end of a line deletes the entirety of the next line, not the next character as expected. Pressing 'backspace' at the start of a line similarly deletes the entire previous line. So, if you type a paragraph, hit enter, think better of it and press backspace to continue adding to the paragraph, you instead lose the entire paragraph you just typed.

=2=

You can inline bibtex references, tables, images, etc. These elements can have information added like 'description' but that information doesn't appear when the elements are used in your article.

More troublingly, you cannot caption anything. Even worse, tables and figures are not numbered. These omissions are baffling for a tool "aimed at ... dissertations" [4].

Footnotes have the option to include library elements but the search widget does not return any hits, so this seems broken.

=3=

I exported 'to publish' which apparently means a zip file. This zip file, when extracted, contains an index.html that merely produces a neverending "Loading..." page in both Firefox and Chrome.

I exported 'to archive' which I discovered returns a single page html file. It does not reflect any changes I made previously in the 'design' tab controlling the the way a table displays. Instead it provides those same controls to the reader, defaulting to 20 rows (including 14 completely blank ones) and large 'next'/'previous' buttons that are disabled. I don't know their purpose.

Exporting 'to backup' returns a .json file.

Selecting text to format it in the editor can cause the formatting buttons to flow off the left side of the screen and be inaccessible if the text is near the beginning of the line.

The 'ordered list' and 'unordered list' formatting buttons don't do anything, even with multiple lines selected, unless you've used shift-enter to do your linebreaks. Using shift-enter does not, however, default to making lists.

Examining GitHub reveals further issues like underscores in URLs being interpreted as italic formatting in the generator, open for 7 months.

=Notes=

1: https://fonio.medialab.sciences-po.fr/demo/read/161ec9c9-f3b... "Fonio works with Google Chrome or Firefox, although we advise you to use Chrome for better stability. "

2: https://github.com/medialab/fonio/graphs/contributors Basically no development in 2020.

3: https://i.imgur.com/ENerBqT.gif

4: https://medialab.sciencespo.fr/en/tools/fonio/ "the application is aimed at allowing to work extensively on the information design of the dissertations"