how to get rid of grey box while using monospaced text in notes app after IOS 17 update

Yes aggravating that we get no response / response from apple.

The only way I have figured out getting rid of the grey box around the text in the "monospace" font is to

change to the "body" font - which sucks because I liked the "monospace" font.

Thanks apple for the undocumented feature!!!

I agree -- the grey box is really dumb. Apple used to be about minimalism and making clean choices, but lately it's all about feature bloat. Too many options in too many apps, and weird bugs because there's so many features. Really a let down!

If you go to Format > Font and choose a monospace font on macOS, you can get a somewhat similar effect to what we had before, but still not the same.

Yes, I'm experiencing this too. I was hoping it was a bug but it appears to be a feature.

Hi hauntingdeath,

Thank you for these additional details.

What you are experiencing is expected behavior.

As mentioned in the article below, "Monospaced formatting has been updated to Monostyled, with inset text and a distinct background."

New features available
 with iOS 17

We strive to bring the best personal computing experience to customers around the world through our innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings. We welcome your feedback on our products here: Product Feedback - Apple

Take care!

Hi hauntingdeath,

You may find some useful information in these resources:

Create and format notes on iPhone

iPhone User Guide

If you’d like to leave feedback and have it reviewed by the appropriate teams at Apple, submit your feedback here: Product Feedback

Regards.

What just happened to my notes???

I have splotches of grey scattered throughout on my iPhone and I can’t get rid of them. Please help.

The font "Monospace" was changed to "Monostyled" and added a

grey background that you CANNOT get rid of. You can change the

"Monostyled" to "Body" and that will remove the grey background.

Sucks I know, as the saying goes you cannot fight city hall!

Such an absurd, arbitrary, unnecessary, and irritating change. Why the background color should be linked with font is so completely beyond me that I have absolutely no idea how a designer would have considered this a good choice.

And after decades of clean, minimal, consistent, human-focused interface design, why has Apple in recent years joined the trend of randomly changing things just to say they've done something new? It's downright exasperating.

This is not a feature. It is a bug for two reasons.

First, it constitutes data loss. User documents have been modified without their consent.

Second, black-text-on-gray-background violates accessibility standards.

There is no set of circumstances under which this is acceptable behavior. Fix it.

Believe it or not (I'm still shocked), there is a straightforward way to fix this. I discovered it by carefully inspecting the various settings for a note that had a weird mix of monospaced Courier text with a nice white background interspersed with an ugly batch of identical Courier text with this ugly gray background. Turned out they had different "Paragraph Styles". So...

You can eliminate the ridiculous gray background by doing the following:

• Select the affected text (or as I did, just Select All)
• Using either the Format menu or Paragraph Styles from the pop-up control-click menu, select "Body". This will get rid of the background, but also change your font (and probably font size), which you then just fix...
• Open the Fonts settings window by selecting Format > Font > Show Fonts
• Set your desired (monospace) font. I like old-school Courier.
• You may also have to adjust font size. (It dropped mine from 14 to 13 for no discernible reason, but I fixed it in this step.)

Et voila. Monospace text on a plain white background. Easy to read. Clean. The way Woz intended.

I don't think it's possible to remove the gray box because it's intended for programming notes, not for random notes.