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Workflowy now supports exporting to OPML
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Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 2, 2013 at 10:47 AM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>I suspect that the issue is rather fundamental and relates to the
>codepage used for the files. You can open the OPML files in a text
>editor and see at the top of the XML description what encoding they use.
>I suspect that Bonsai can only recognise the simple latin character set,
>while Carbonfin recognises others, but encodes everything into this.
I see… Actually I’m not focusing on the accented characters issue any more, as CarbonFin wasn’t able to import those either and I could avoid using them, if necessary (mostly people’s names). CarbonFin gave me the error message “Unable to import this outline. Could not decode to unicode - xml encoding was either wrong or missing and UTF-8 didn’t work.” So I imported the opml file where I manually removed accented characters. I’m more concerned with the other problem, the inability to import inline notes.
Regarding the XML/OPML description, the following happened:
The original Workflowy export file says
Once it’s been roundtripped (and fixed) via CarbonFin, it says
So it seems that CarbonFin somehow changed it back to an older format (?), which could also display the inline notes.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 2, 2013 at 10:51 AM
Dr Andus wrote:
Woops, the forum software removed the mark-ups. Let me try without the brackets then:
Regarding the XML/OPML description, the following happened:
The original Workflowy export file says
?xml version=“1.0”?
opml version=“2.0”
Once it’s been roundtripped (and fixed) via CarbonFin, it says
opml version=‘1.0’
So it seems that CarbonFin somehow changed it back to an older format (?), which could also display the inline notes.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 2, 2013 at 11:25 AM
In the meantime I’ve also come across Joe Pairman’s online Workflowy OPML converter (which I’m too scared to try, as my Workflowy data is all very personal stuff):
http://outline2outline.apps.joepairman.com/
He also provides a Python script, which can be run offline (unfortunately I don’t know enough Python to be able to run it). However, he says the following about inline note text:
“Note text becomes the value for the _note attribute; a non-standard but common usage, supported by Omni Outliner, CarbonFin Outliner, and Tree. (Fargo can display attributes, including note attributes, in the sidebar.)”
So if I understand correctly, putting the Workflowy OPML file through CarbonFin might actually assign this “_note attribute” which subsequently might become readable in Bonsai?
What I don’t get is why the Bonsai filter that is provided by CarbonFin doesn’t do the same as the online CarbonFin conversion. I even discovered that my CarbonFin OMPL filter was an older version (01/02/2009), so I replaced it with the latest version (17/11/2009). The only difference between the two is that the older one had encoding=“ISO-8859-1”, while the new one has encoding=“UTF-8” (not sure what the difference is). However, this did not fix either the accented character problem or the inline notes when importing the Workflowy OPML file directly into Bonsai. Anyway…
Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 2, 2013 at 11:42 AM
Dr Andus wrote:
>He also provides a Python script, which can be run offline
>(unfortunately I don’t know enough Python to be able to run it).
Here is the link to the Python script:
http://code.joepairman.com/outline2outline/overview
Posted by jaslar
Jun 2, 2013 at 07:07 PM
I just tested the OPML export/import with tkoutline, Notecase Pro, and Fargo.
tkoutline = error message
Notecase Pro = the right pane shows the correct information and hierachy—but the left pane is completely blank.
Fargo =worked great.