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Here is a first draft of a droplet which I have used to import Taskpaper files to Omnifocus.

If you download and unzip the droplet, you should find that dragging and dropping a taskpaper file onto it will lead to a basic import.

Tasks in the file which are either not preceded by a project heading, or are under the heading "Inbox:" are placed straight in the Omnifocus Inbox.

Other projects and tasks are placed in a date-stamped import folder which you will find at the bottom of the project sidebar.

In addition to files created with Taskpaper, this should in principle work with any plain .txt file in which actions are preceded by "- ", project header lines end with ":" and context labels at the end of a line begin with " @"
Plain lines which begin without a dash and a space are interpreted as notes if they are preceded by an action line or a project line, and as inbox items otherwise.

(However, a draft only, and may not work with your data - intended simply for reference. No warranties, implicit or explicit)

Download page

Last edited by RobTrew; 2007-12-06 at 12:04 PM..
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by RobTrew View Post
Here is a first draft of a droplet which I have used to import Taskpaper files to Omnifocus.

If you download and unzip the droplet, you should find that dragging and dropping a taskpaper file onto it will lead to a basic import.

Tasks in the file which are either not preceded by a project heading, or are under the heading "Inbox:" are placed straight in the Omnifocus Inbox.

Other projects and tasks are placed in a date-stamped import folder which you will find at the bottom of the project sidebar.

In addition to files created with Taskpaper, this should in principle work with any plain .txt file in which actions are preceded by "- ", project header lines end with ":" and context labels at the end of a line begin with " @"
Plain lines which begin without a dash and a space are interpreted as notes if they are preceded by an action line or a project line, and as inbox items otherwise.

(However, a draft only, and may not work with your data - intended simply for reference. No warranties, implicit or explicit)

Download page
Cool. Using this and I appreciate it.

Cheers,
D
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by devn View Post
Cool. Using this and I appreciate it.
Good. I'm glad it's useful.

Anyone who who is interested in inspecting the code can, of course, do so with the OS X Script Editor.
 
Now modified to handle lines which end with two Taskpaper tags,
e.g. a context tag followed by a @done tag.

(Note that Taskpaper allows multiple context tags whereas Omnifocus currently allows for only one.

The current version of the importer simply uses the first [leftmost] of any context tags on a Taskpaper task line, and drops any additional context tags that follow it.)

Download page

Last edited by RobTrew; 2007-12-14 at 07:50 PM..
 
Updated to handle tab-indented sub-tasks in Taskpaper, which now become nested sub-tasks in Omnifocus.

Download page
 
Hi Rob,

First, thanks so very much for creating this. My AppleScript skills are so rusty I doubt I could have done it in several days of thrashing.

I wrote a Java app to convert my In Control documents (I know, don't laugh) to TaskPaper format, and then import these with your droplet. After 15 years of use, I have quite a lot of data that I don't want to lose. But with my purchase of a MacBook, running the Mac OS 9-only In Control app is no longer a viable option. So the release of OF and your droplet was quite timely.

I ran into three issues that might be of interest to you:

1. With large imports, I get an "AppleEvent timed out" error message. I worked around this by breaking up my import data on a per-project basis.

Though sometimes this happens even with smaller imports - seems related to whether I switch between OF and the droplet during the import.

2. Notes seem to get an extra carriage return at the end. Not significant.

3. If I import a task with a short name (< 4 characters), I'll get an AppleScript error that says "Can't make {} into type <<class pALL>>". For example, if the task is "- ID" then this happens. I just added " stuff" to the end of short task titles to work around this.

So in the end, I was able to get my 3000+ items converted from In Control to OmniFocus. Now I just need to clean them all up :)

-- Ken
 
Thanks, that's helpful.

I have fixed the problem with short action texts.

Probably won't have time to look at the time-out and trailing newline for a couple of weeks, but I will investigate them in due course.

Download page

Last edited by RobTrew; 2008-02-28 at 10:31 AM..
 
I have updated this to make its use a little more flexible:

Either 1. Copy text into the clipboard and run the script

Or 2. Select one or more .txt or .taskpaper files in Finder, Copy [Cmd C], and run the script

Or 3. Drag one or more .txt or .taskpaper files onto the icon of this script

NOTE: I use it in a KeyBoard Maestro macro which precedes it with a Copy action. This allows me to select some text in an editor, (or some files in a Finder window), and send things straight into OF with one keystroke.

(Note that it assumes the text is broadly in (old or new) TaskPaper format).

Download page: http://bit.ly/TXT2OF

--

Last edited by RobTrew; 2011-01-10 at 08:47 PM.. Reason: Ver 0.52 allows several files to be dragged onto the droplet, and corrects handling of clipboard text
 
RobTrew, thank you so much for this. You saved me a great deal of time in migrating from TaskPaper to OmniFocus.

The only issue I ran into with the droplet was the handling of multiply-nested projects; the droplet would get confused a bit by the multi-level structure. Not a big deal, since OmniFocus' indent/outdent functions are easy to use...

Thanks again!
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimjo View Post
multiply-nested projects
Thanks for the feedback - I'll take a look.
 
 


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