HTML Export with Notes?
 

I use OmniOutliner Pro (3.9.5) to maintain a list of user stories that we test with each release of our software at work. Only two people in our office own OO so I need to export files as HTML for the team to be able to use them. The line item entries are usually a single sentence description of a story but then I attach more verbose descriptions to each entry as a note. Unfortunately, when I export these files as HTML to post on our intranet site, all of these notes are not shown and everyone testing loses valuable supplementary detail.

Is there a way to achieve this using the program? It seems that the export HTML functions don't include the note data at all (even though they're populated in other export types such MS Word HTML and RTFD). Any idea why that would be?

Notes will be exported as long as they're visible in the document. Not sure off-hand if there's a way to control this if you're viewing notes in a pane. What you need to do before exporting is switch to viewing notes inline (if you aren't already), then Expand All, Select All, Edit Note (cmd-'). Might need to use the Edit Note command twice as it'll probably collapse first if you have any showing already.

The following bit of Applescript should automate Derek's suggestion:

[code]

tell application "OmniOutliner Professional"
set MyDoc to front document
repeat with MyRow in every row of MyDoc
if (length of (note of MyRow as string)) > 0 then
set note expanded of MyRow to true
end if
end repeat
tell MyDoc to set note display to in line
end tell

[/code]

Thanks so much you guys. The script and the description both helped out and now I've got one of those things that's been annoying me for months fixed.

@DerekM: I'm not sure if you work for Omnigroup or not, but I'd love it if the export HTML functioned more closely to the actual application with regard to notes. I have hundreds of user stories that I'm exporting and being forced to show all the notes within a level of a document makes it quite unwieldy to look at. I'd like to keep the export as tidy as I keep the actual document as it greatly accelerates navigation of the outline. It'd be great if there was a "click to view note" next to each item in the export if I saved the document with each note collapsed. Just my two cents.

Hopefully Derek will log your request into the database, but if you've got other things you'd like to see, use Help->Send Feedback to get them into the system with a minimum of fuss.

Sounds like you want the Dynamic HTML export to be extended a bit so that notes can be hidden/shown, like it allows you to do with collapsing and expanding rows. Might be worth taking a DHTML document from OO and testing it out on your colleagues' systems to make sure what is there already works.

I've tested the DHTML file to ensure that what's there already works and I just submitted feedback from the application with the feature request. That small feature would greatly improve the product for me. It seems weird that exporting the file doesn't export the notes unless I've got them displaying inline and fully expanded. In my case, the notes are most of the document so having them pruned isn't so cool.

I have a experimental version of the DHTML exporter that does include toggle-able notes. The whole thing has been heavily restructured and I'm sure still missing things so I haven't released it yet. And I haven't had time to work on it since the iPad was announced :) But that will be coming.

Currently we don't have any way to handle export settings for XSLT based exporters so we can't offer any options like there is in settings or for printing.