Exploding Notes

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

This process can be used to help with the import of data as well as for existing notes. For imports, drag, a plain text format file into an Outline or Map view, so as to create a new note. Now with that, or with a large existing note selected, choose Explode... from the Note menu. This presents the Explode dialog.

Next, decide whether to create each new note after a certain number of characters or after a delimiter such as a period, then click the radio button next to your choice. The choices are:

• Break at paragraphs. Breaks each paragraph into a new note. New in v3.6.0 and default option.
• Break at tabs. Breaks on every tab or tab sequence. New in v3.6.0.
• Break every. Change the number of characters after which to break the existing text. (Default option prior to v3.6.0.)
• Delimiter. Break on a delimiter. Delimiters you can use include:
  • \r (new exploded notes will begin with each Return or hard line break)
  • \t (new exploded notes will begin with each tab, e.g. for tab-delimited content pasted into a note)
  • \, (new exploded notes will begin with each comma, e.g. use for CSV content pasted into a note)
  • Otherwise use a custom string of your choice, e.g. a sequence of characters unlikely to occur in normal copy, e.g. '####' or 'XYXYXY', etc.
  • Delete delimiter. Only available if the 'Delimiter' option is set (default = not ticked). Tick this to remove the specified delimiter from the new exploded notes.

The Explode button starts the Explode process using the choices set above.

The exploded note itself remains unchanged and a new child container of the selected note is created, called "Exploded Text", and which contains the resulting new (sub-)notes. Using this secondary container allows for the fact - more so for exploding existing notes than for new import - that the note being exploded might already have children. Thus note that the Exploded Text container is added to the outline order after any pre-existing child notes for the exploded note.

The newly created notes contain an appropriate segment of the original note. There will (should!) be no empty notes, e.g. caused where two hard line returns are used as faux paragraph breaks, as these are automatically deleted as part of the Explode process.

The title of a created note is the note's body copy trimmed with an ellipsis if the string runs over about 64 characters.