In Omnifocus beta 96125 the File\Export\Plain text (Taskpaper) function still contains basic bugs and design quirks which drop key elements of data from the export and make it unusable for many purposes.
In particular:
1. The distinction between completed and active tasks is dropped.
(Completed tasks are exported but not given a @done tag, leaving them indistinguishable from active tasks).
2. Taskpaper tags are sometimes misplaced, rendering them unparsable in Taskpaper.
(@done and @context tags always need to be placed at the end of the first line of a Taskpaper task, but are currently exported to the nth line where an Omnifocus task contains multiple lines - additional lines are interpreted as notes by Taskpaper, and any tags in them are ignored)
3. The indentation of nested tasks is lost.
(Taskpaper provides good support for tabbed indentation of sub-tasks. The exporter currently fails to indent child tasks, however, and wraps them instead in redundant double quotes)
4. Contexts are dropped in exports from Context view.
(Tasks exported from Context view are not tagged in Taskpaper with their contexts. They are only tagged with tokenised names of their containing projects, which is inconsistent with the designed semantics of Taskpaper. Note that Taskpaper supports the attachment of multiple tags to any task)
The draft applescript at the following link aims to plug these gaps and may serve as a stopgap until exporting to Taskpaper is mended in Omnifocus.
Rather than writing to a text file it places the Taskpaper-formatted text in a new Apple Mail message. If you need a Taskpaper text file, you can copy and paste from the mail message.
Applescript download page
In particular:
1. The distinction between completed and active tasks is dropped.
(Completed tasks are exported but not given a @done tag, leaving them indistinguishable from active tasks).
2. Taskpaper tags are sometimes misplaced, rendering them unparsable in Taskpaper.
(@done and @context tags always need to be placed at the end of the first line of a Taskpaper task, but are currently exported to the nth line where an Omnifocus task contains multiple lines - additional lines are interpreted as notes by Taskpaper, and any tags in them are ignored)
3. The indentation of nested tasks is lost.
(Taskpaper provides good support for tabbed indentation of sub-tasks. The exporter currently fails to indent child tasks, however, and wraps them instead in redundant double quotes)
4. Contexts are dropped in exports from Context view.
(Tasks exported from Context view are not tagged in Taskpaper with their contexts. They are only tagged with tokenised names of their containing projects, which is inconsistent with the designed semantics of Taskpaper. Note that Taskpaper supports the attachment of multiple tags to any task)
The draft applescript at the following link aims to plug these gaps and may serve as a stopgap until exporting to Taskpaper is mended in Omnifocus.
Rather than writing to a text file it places the Taskpaper-formatted text in a new Apple Mail message. If you need a Taskpaper text file, you can copy and paste from the mail message.
Applescript download page
Last edited by RobTrew; 2007-12-15 at 11:06 AM..