Exporting outline notes to scrivener

Q & A - getting started with Tinderbox
1

Hello,

I haven’t yet had time to go through the entire manual.

I use tinderbox to take notes and then finally articulate using scrivener. How do I export the notes from a tinder container?

Thank you

2

What do you mean by this term?

The normal form of export to Scrivener is using the built-in Scrivener export template, that generated OPML data. The limit is less what Tinderbox can export and more what Scrivener can or will accept. OPML’s limitation is that essentially is was designed for plain-text simple outline so will retain note nesting and title/plain-text per note. So rich-text mark-up (bold, highlighting, linking) and custom data (e.g. user attributes) don’t transfer.

I’m unclear as to whether the recent v3 release of Scrivener improves interchange choices.

3

My apologies.

I meant " How do I export from the notes from a tinder container?" ( I guess that is the right term)

4

Forgive me, lots of people come to Tinderbox from other apps and ‘tinder’ is a shortening of the app’s name I’ve never seen before (and also the name of a different app!). OK, to export a container using the Scrivener template:

  1. Go to File menu → Built-in Templates → Scrivener. this will add the necessary templates & prototypes (and their containers to your document.
  2. Select the container you wish to export (with its descendant notes) and open the HTML Inspector’s Export tab.
  3. In the Template control , select (if not already pre-selected) “/Templates/Scrivener”.
  4. Change the extension from ‘.html’ to ‘.opml’
  5. Click focus back to the main window’s view pane.
  6. Select the container to export.
  7. File menu ->Export Selected note. Check the target folder and file name are as desired and click ‘Export’.

You now have an OPML file you can import into Scrivener.

8 Likes
5

Thanks for yet another helpful post! Works like a charm! However, when using Tinderbox for developing the structure and content of scientific journal articles, it helps to have one note per argument/segment on the same level to be able to set/see the links to get overview in map view. It is easy to get structure among the many notes using separators in outline view, but the separators do not follow when exporting the opml-file. Am I doing something wrong? Is there any way to get the separators to come along? Ideally as headings when opening in Scrivener. This is not a mayor problem as it is rather easy to add the “lost” structure in Scrivener, but I would like to do as much of the work as possible in Tinderbox and I am a big fan of finding the best way of doing things :slight_smile:

6

If you look at the OPML format, it has no notion of separators. as importantly, nor does Scrivener. So, it’s pointless to assume Tinderbox can export that via OMPL.

In fairness, that’s not OPML’s fault. You just happen to want something it wasn’t designed to do. Nor is it your fault, why would you know it’s not capable of such structure? :slight_smile:

1 Like
7

Got it! Thanks for straightening that out. I don’t know much what is going on “under the hood”, so I thought it was worth to ask people who do. Thanks again!