Importing Notes

You have several options for moving text into Tinderbox:

To move moderate amounts of text between Tinderbox and another application, it may be easiest to copy and paste the text. This approach has the added benefit of giving you a chance to review your notes: arrange them, color-code them, consolidate related notes, and prune out notes that are out-of-date or irrelevant.

You can drag a text file into a Map view, then Explode it into several notes by specifying where Tinderbox should divide the notes.

DRAG-AND-DROP

Drag-and-drop can be the quickest way to add an entire text file to your Tinderbox document.

You can drag and drop:

• text: drag a text selection into Tinderbox and—
  • drop it into a text window to insert the dragged text at that point in the text
  • drop it into a view window to create a new note. To qualify, a text file should be a plain text file(.txt extension). To create such a file, look at your word processor’s facilities for saving a file as text only. If you attempt to drag and drop a file that Tinderbox does not recognize as a text file, the file will zip back to where it came from when you let go, rather than being dropped into Tinderbox.)
• a text file: drag a text file from the Finder. Drop it into a view window to create a new note containing the dragged text
• a folder of text files: drag a folder of text files from the Finder. Drop it into a view window to create a new container, which will hold individual notes for each file. If the folder is dragged again onto the same container, changed files will update their notes and other notes will be left unaltered.
• a text or picture clipping: drag a Finder clipping—
  • drop it into a text window to insert the text or image clipping at that point in the text
  • drop it into a view window to create a new note containing the text or image
• a Tinderbox clipping that has been dragged to the desktop from Tinderbox
• an image: drag an image from a drag-and-drop aware image-editing application—
  • drop it into a text window to insert the image at that point in the text
  • drop it into a view window to create a new note containing the image
  • drop it into a map view to create a picture adornment
• Storyspace files: may be dropped into Tinderbox view windows to import Storyspace writing spaces into Tinderbox notes
• Bookmarks from web browsers and Yojimbo create Tinderbox notes; the URL of the note reflects the URL of the bookmark
• News items and subscriptions from NetNewsWire
• OPML and tab-indented outlines, dropped into Tinderbox, will be imported
• vCards, dropped into Tinderbox from the Address Book or other vCard-enabled programs, will be imported and key fields mapped to Tinderbox attributes
• Spreadsheets and other tab-delimited tables will be imported

SPREADSHEET IMPORT

Selecting a table in a spreadsheet and pasting it into Tinderbox will create a useful set of notes:

• The first row is treated as a set of headings, which map to attributes. New user attributes will be created for attributes that do not already exist.
• A new container will be created to for the table's rows.
• Each row of the table becomes a note. The table's fields are key attributes, and these attributes are populated from the table

EXPLODING

You can convert a large text file into several notes by specifying where Tinderbox should make the divisions.

• Drag a text file into a Map view
• With the note selected, choose Explode... from the Note menu
• Decide whether to end each note after a certain number of characters or after a delimiter such as a period, then click the radio button next to your choice
• Change the number of characters or the delimiter if necessary. To remove the delimiter from the new exploded notes, check the Delete delimiter box.
• Click Explode.

The new notes will appear as children of the original note, a container called Exploded Text.

Delimiters you can use include:

\r (new exploded notes will begin with each Return)

\n (new exploded notes will begin with each new line)

\t (new exploded notes will begin with each tab)