The formatting of exported annotations has, ever since Marvin's birth 5 years ago, been one of Marvin's gravest flaws and weaknesses.
But at the same time, it's also been one of Marvin's strengths – yep, that's because Marvin's competition is even far more incompetent than Marvin is, in terms of annotations export.
Basically, what we have in Marvin today, and what we've always had in Marvin, in terms of annotations export, is
bare-bones, glitchy functionality. Marvin annotations, when exported, are
never ready for "production use", so to speak. During annotations export, Marvin mangles the formatting of the highlighted passages being exported (because everything from the text source gets converted into plain-text, paragraph breaks get deleted,
and superfluous line-breaks get inserted [!]),
and Marvin also mangles the formatting of user annotations being exported (all line breaks get deleted).
All the corruption that occurs during the export of Marvin annotations, must then be repaired manually on the desktop computer, causing lots of frustration, time delay and much productivity loss for the Marvin user. But what can you do? After all, all the Marvin competitors are even
worse, in terms of annotations export.
That's the sorry state of e-book software world-wide, anno 2016.
We can only hope Marvin will improve its annotations export capabilities one day. It's been frequently requested over the years, so one can only hope. Naturally, the customization options Bounce mentions would be highly desirable – such as the option to toggle the insertion of time-stamps (and other components of the exported file) on or off on an on-demand basis.