Importing Outlines Into DTP any suggestions?

[dorich]

I have an outline created in the visual part of Inspiration and I would like to get the text into DTP for analysis and final rewrite.
The text is approximately 24K words.
It would be preferable to get each section of the outline into a different note in DTP and in a perfect world it would be good to be able to maintain the hierarchy of the original outline.

However, I can’t see any way of doing this other than importing the document as one note and then manually cutting and pasting to recreate the outline.

I tried using an opml export by going from Inspiration to Appleworks/Word to Omnioutliner to an opml file. Probably due to my lack of knowledge about the file formats this just created a file with some data but a lot of blank entries - it would have taken more work than the manual recreation of the outline to clean it up.

I wondered if there are any users that have working strategies for solving this problem.
To restate, what I want to do is import an outline from Inspiration into DTP maintaining the hierarchy and keeping each topic and associated note in a separate DTP note.

Regards

Richard Bullen

[cgrunenberg]

Which export formats does Inspiration support? (the transition from Inspiration to AppleWorks/Word to OmniOutliner to OPML is probably not retaining all necessary information)

[dorich]

@cgrunenberg

Which export formats does Inspiration support? (the transition from Inspiration to AppleWorks/Word to OmniOutliner to OPML is probably not retaining all necessary information)

Inspiration only has the ability to export to Word or Apple works. This appears to create a file in which the indents of the hierarchy are created by the software setting the begining of the paragraph rather than indenting on tabs.

What I’ve been able to accomplish is getting a flat file (no hierarchy) into Omnioutliner.

I took a short section of this file and Working in OOL I recreated the hierarchy of topics. I attempted to import the OOL file into DTP but the result was one note with the raw file and all the markup. Note I’m using OOL Version 2.2.6
I exported the file to OPML and tried importing that into DTP.
The result was imported with hierarchy but the order of the original document was not preserved.
In addition some of the notes I attached to topics were not preserved. The behavior appears inconsistent, some notes appeared while others were lost.

I got the impression from DTP documentation that I could do a clean import of Omnioutliner into DTP but perhaps this only applies to the latest version of OOL? Christian can you advise?

DEVONthink Professional is able to handle outliner files created by OmniOutliner and other applications in both OmniOutliner format and OPML (Outlining Processor Markup Language). When importing such files, DEVONthink Professional recreates a groups hierarchy, when exporting, it generates one OmniOutliner/OPML file out of multiple groups and documents.

Regarding ompl is it true that notes are not carried over and that the order of the topics is not preserved?

Richard Bullen

[Bill_DeVille]

dorich: If you can print your outline while in Inspiration you can invoke Command-P. When the Print panel appears, click on PDF and choose “Save to DEVONthink Pro.scpt”.

The resulting PDF will contain the text of the Inspiration document for searching and analysis, as well as the layout of the Inspiration document. You can then select any or all of the text for further use, e.g. as selected text for incorporation into another document. If the text is columnar, you can open it in Preview and select text column by column.

The script works for any printable document in any application.

Is that what you need?

[cgrunenberg]

@dorich

I got the impression from DTP documentation that I could do a clean import of Omnioutliner into DTP but perhaps this only applies to the latest version of OOL? Christian can you advise?

is it true that notes are not carried over and that the order of the topics is not preserved?

1. Just send me the file and I’ll check if everything work’s expected
2. No. But the visible order might be different due - just switch to View > Sorting > Unsorted

[dorich]

@Bill_DeVille

dorich: If you can print your outline while in Inspiration you can invoke Command-P. When the Print panel appears, click on PDF and choose “Save to DEVONthink Pro.scpt”.

The resulting PDF will contain the text of the Inspiration document for searching and analysis, as well as the layout of the Inspiration document. You can then select any or all of the text for further use, e.g. as selected text for incorporation into another document. If the text is columnar, you can open it in Preview and select text column by column.

The script works for any printable document in any application.

Is that what you need?

Hi Bill:

Thanks for the suggestion.

I did verify that this works perfectly.

Unfortunately this doesn’t solve my problem.
I was attempting to get each topic and associated note into DTP so that I could use the concordance and smart folders to identify where certain keywords were located.
The reason for this is that I’ve written a first outline and want to move to a first draft. Normally I would read through everything I have and rearrange as necessary but it occured to me that using the power of DTP I could group topics by keywords and this would speed up the workflow.

For the above reason its necessary to get each topic and its associated note in a seperate note in DTP.

Thanks.

Richard Bullen