Exporting text

TO EXPORT TEXT

To export the text of all or some of the notes in your Tinderbox document,

• Open a Nakakoji view on any note in the document
• Choose a text export template, to describe how the text should be exported
• Choose how much of the document should be exported— which note or notes, or the entire document
• Export the text.

All of these are described in the rest of this chapter.

TEXT EXPORT TEMPLATE

The details of how text is exported are determined by which text export template you choose for the export. Tinderbox comes with some simple export templates that are always available, but you can easily write your own export templates.

For each exported note, Tinderbox copies the text export template to the output file. Placeholdersare replaced with information from the note. For example:

^title^

is replaced by the note’s title,

^text^

by the note’s text, and

^get(theAttribute)^

by the value of theAttribute. Most of the placeholders described in HTML Export may also be used in text export, but these are less often necessary.

Avoid ^children and ^justChildren in text export, since text export provides implicitly exports all the descendants of a note or the entire document.

NAKAKOJI VIEW WINDOWS

Nakakoji views: named for Kumiyo Nakakoji, who, with Yasushiro Yamamoto, was the first to implement a continuous text view of all the text in a hypertext.

A Nakakoji view window shows you how the text in the selected note (or document, or portion of the document) would be exported with the chosen text export template.

In this window you can:

• Choose which text export template to use;
• Select how much of the document to export;
• Export the text

You can have many Nakakoji view windows open at once.

NAKAKOJI VIEW EXPORT CONTROLS

How much to export

The radio buttons at the left of a Nakakoji view window choose how much of the document to export (and show in the window):

• Entire document:
• Name of note and contents: export the text in the selected note and its descendants—the notes it contains, the notes they contain, and so on.
• Selected notes: export the text in the selected note or notes. You can select multiple notes in any view window.
• Path: export the text in the selected note, and all notes linked to it by a chain of links of the link type you choose. The popup menu lists all the link types used in the document.

Which template to use

The popup menu at the top center of the window lets you choose which template should be used when exporting to text. Choose a file name from the popup menu, which lists all the text export template files in the text export templates folder.

If this menu displays . . .

. . . Choose template folder,

• Then you need to tell Tinderbox which folder contains the text export templates you are using.
• Select Choose template folder in the popup menu, then use the standard Macintosh file dialog to find the folder containing the template you want to use select the template you want, and click Open in the file dialog

. . . the name of a template,

• Then you can choose any text export template located in the same folder as that template, by selecting it in the popup menu

Export

Click this button to export the text of the note (or notes or entire document).

After exporting, you can open this new text file with whatever word processor or other text application you choose. (You may need to check your application’s instructions for opening or importing a plain text file.)

Edit

Click this button to edit the text export template file used for this window. The template file will open with whatever application you used to create it—a template created with BBEdit will open in BBEdit, a template created in SimpleText will open in SimpleText, and so on.

You can then modify the template, save your changes, return to Tinderbox, and click Update or Export, to see how your changes affect the text export.

Update

Click this button to update the text shown in the window to reflect any changes you have made to the options in this window.