[macula]

I tried to export my OmniOutliner document into OPML but, alas, all formatting was lost: no bold or italic text to be found anywhere.

Any workarounds?

Thank you!

Originally Posted by macula

I tried to export my OmniOutliner document into OPML but, alas, all formatting was lost: no bold or italic text to be found anywhere.

Any workarounds?

Well, the OPML standard does not directly include any provision for emphases like bold and italic. You might add simple HTML markup into the text nodes, but there is no guarantee that particular OPML editors would interpret or display it correctly.

But stepping back, what are you trying to do ?

[macula]

Thanks RobTrew,
What I want to do is import a long OmniOutliner document containing hierarchically organized research notes into DevonThink Pro, in such a way that:

1) Every OO entry will correspond to one "RTF document" in DevonThink, and
2) The hierarchy in DevonThink will be the same as it is in OO.

OPML export seemed to do the job perfectly until I realized that all formatting was lost.

Manually adding HTML is not an option, unfortunately, as the document is very extensive…

Thanks again.

Originally Posted by macula

What I want to do is import a long OmniOutliner document containing hierarchically organized research notes into DevonThink Pro, in such a way that:

1) Every OO entry will correspond to one "RTF document" in DevonThink, and
2) The hierarchy in DevonThink will be the same as it is in OO.

I wonder if this is really the best way to use Devonthink ...

Devonthink is not as good as Omnioutliner at representing the hierarchy of a research argument or a research data base because the sequence of a set of peers does not carry information (the order is lost by automatic sorting).

On the other hand, Devonthink is excellent at indexing and retrieving relevant files.

I would be inclined to split your OO3 document up into slightly smaller documents (certainly not as small as one document per row, but small enough to have some meaning and utility - something in the region of half a page or a few related paragaphs), throw these smaller documents straight into Devonthink (still as 003 files rather than RTF - their contents will still be visible, formatted and indexed), and let the Devonthink indexing and cross document search (and the existing Omnioutliner hierarchy at single or half page level) enable you to find what you want.

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[macula]

Actually, the sequence is not necessarily lost in DevonThink. "Unsorted View" allows the ordering of items to be set manually. You do have a point, however, in that the setting is global and therefore not very flexible.

At any rate, I begin to realize that indexing is indeed the way to go. I do not have the luxury of breaking up my document into smaller files because my database is constantly under development, with entries added and deleted every day. I would therefore have to import the entire OO3 document. Why do you imply that this could be a problem?

Thanks.

Originally Posted by macula

Actually, the sequence is not necessarily lost in DevonThink. "Unsorted View" allows the ordering of items to be set manually. You do have a point, however, in that the setting is global and therefore not very flexible.

And once lost, you can't retrieve it ...

Originally Posted by macula

I would therefore have to import the entire OO3 document. Why do you imply that this could be a problem?

No technical problem, but low-yield in terms of DT search.

DT search returns whole documents ... More useful to get back a 1 page document than a 100 page document, and then have to read through it ...

The DT contents pane shows the contents of an OO3 page through Quicklook, but search terms will not be highlighted within the content.

If you want highlighting of search terms within documents found by DT, I would use File > Export > RTF in OO3, and place Rich Text versions of your OO3 material in DevonThink.

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[macula]

Thanks. So it seems to me that the best way to go is to import that OPML file generated by OO. I will be losing the formatting, but my searches in DT will be as fine-grained as my original info in OO is.