Pasting Taskpaper-format text into OmniOutliner
 

OmniOutliner does a good job of importing Taskpaper formatted text files,

[CODE]Header:
- Point
- Sub point 1
- Sub point 2
- Supporting detail x
- Supporting detail y
- Sub point 3
- Next point
- Detail A
- Detail B
- Detail C
- Last point[/CODE]

preserving indentation and converting leading hyphens to oo3 bullets.

(I find this useful, because I generate a lot of my drafts in plain text (on a cheap [URL="http://www.renlearn.com/neo/NEO2/default.aspx"]Neo2[/URL] device, or, even on OS X, in [URL="http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom"]WriteRoom[/URL]), and a simple tab-indented TaskPaper format allows me to nest points in a way that OO3 will understand once I get to the stage of re-shaping and editing).

[B]Pasting[/B] Taskpaper-formatted text into OO3 works less well - everything is collapsed into a single oo3 item.

This is a pity - I move from WriteRoom to OO3 so often that for many purposes I prefer to copy and paste rather than manually save to a TXT file and then reload into OO3.

A useful solution is, from the terminal:

[CODE]pbpaste | open -f -a 'OmniOutliner Professional'[/CODE]

or, to launch it as a simple Applescript which expands all rows of the resulting outline:

[CODE]do shell script "pbpaste | open -f -a 'OmniOutliner Professional'"

tell application id "com.omnigroup.OmniOutlinerPro3"
set expanded of rows of front document to true
end tell
[/CODE]

I personally do this from a [URL="http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/"]Keyboard Maestro[/URL] macro, which precedes the applescript with a copy action, yielding the work-flow:
[LIST=1][*]Select TaskPaper format text in some application,[*]type a hot-key,[*]an indented and expanded OO3 window opens.[/LIST]

[COLOR="White"]--[/COLOR]

This also works as a way of quickly getting a Tinderbox outline into OO3.

(Doesn't work, unfortunately, with MS Word outlines - though it does work with tab-indented text in Word, and in other editors and browsers).