[Tb] import from Inspiration outlines

>Mark,
>
>I used and enjoyed Inspiration years ago. It looks like they're really=20
>focused in on the secondary-school market these days.
>

Jim

Thanks for your feedback. Yes, Inspiration seems to have a small niche
in visual outlining for teachers and kids. Personally I don't do much
with the visual portions of their program, and they have gone backwards
in some areas, as they ported it to Windows, and then OS X.

Probably the biggest single advantage that I think TB can provide, is to
get all my related documents into one big container. And based on what
I have read so far about TB, there is much much more than that.

>If Inspiration can export to a valid XML file (perhaps the HTML export=20
>will work, if nothing else), then it should be possible to use XSLT to=20
>translate into the Tinderbox XML schema. If you have a small export=20
>file that you can post, I'll be glad to take a look. Perhaps I can make=20
>a web-based tool for some of the more common conversions. (Note to=20
>self: Check to see if Marc-Antoine's TinderToolBox can be adapted=20
>here.)
>

I have written Inspiration support to see if they might be exporting
OPML or XML anytime in the near future. Their last version - 7.5 came
out 18 months ago.

I will post another message to this list with some small examples of
Inspirations's HTML and plain text export.

>Do you suppose the HTML output includes information on layout, color,=20
>etc? Can you see which of the available export formats is the most=20
>"complete"? MS Word should also save as valid XHTML. Feel free to send=20
>multiple formats (directly to me) if you'd like me to compare them.
>

Hmmmm, MS Word having valid XHTML. I never would have thought of that.
I will give that a try next, and send you that file by private email.

=46or my purposes, I have no need for styled formats, colors, or much of
anything other than the raw text, kept in the hierarchical structure.

>
>> A bigger problem appears to be getting the content of Inspiration's
>> outline entries into TB on an automatic basis. That is, some of my
>> Inspiration notes have formatted content associated with them, and=20
>> while
>> I can export that into plain text, TB cannot handle it.
>
>Not sure I'm following you here. By "formatted content," do you mean=20
>styled text?

Yes, I did not explain myself very well. I have no need for styled
text. What I was trying to say is that while the outline structure in a
plain text format is maintained by indenting each level with Tabs, the
content of any outline element is just dumped as the next line of the
plain text document, with no indentation. It's probably clearer to look
at the sample plain text format to see what I mean.

In the meantime, Mark Bernstein from TinderBox has contacted me to offer
assistance in importing this, and I have also sent him the examples of
Inspiration exports.

I will keep everybody informed of the progress that is made. I want to
end up with some sort of Applescript that processes all files in a
folder, and puts all of the content into one TB document.

Thank you for your help.

mark
Received on Tue Oct 19 19:47:01 2004