Tinderbox Scholar - preview and export documents using Pandoc

Thanks - I look forward to it! Can I express my thanks again for your work and the many videos? A real service for the Tinderbox community.

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Thank you. The support and recognition mean a lot. The undersung hero of all of this, however, is @mwra. Without Mark’s steadfast tutelage none of this would be possible. And, we can never forget all those that show up for the Saturday meetups, including yourself, that inspire so many ideas.

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I tried to load the tinderbox file Tinderbox-Scholar into TBX9 and may be the tinderbox file needs updating? Also the link to github leads to an error (not found).

Try this one Release New Pandoc-Tinderbox 2.0 · bcdavasconcelos/Pandoc-Tinderbox · GitHub

Thanks a lot, this was fast!

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thank for this @Bernard-0! It’s an highly inspiring set-up.

Did you @Bernard-0 decide on the “Thesis”-Container being a “Separator” in order to:

  1. hide its content-notes from the map-view
  2. and thus preventing the outline order of the content-notes from being impacted by movement of the content-notes in map-view? Or is the outline Order noch impacted at all?

Because:
I actually would like to have all the content-notes visible in map-view (for me the reason to start working with Tinderbox in the first place).

toggling Separator on/off

  • I just added a on/off-Toggle for the Separator. Seems to work for me … but I certainly don’t know whether this would effect some not so obvious template-functionalities.
  • How to you use map-view in this set-up and do you use map-view at all?
  • And if so: Maybe you could kindly elaborate a little bit on to what extent you use map-view … but then consolidate the content-notes (into the Separator-Mode of the “Thesis”-Container) in order to get things ready for publication.

Maybe @satikusala could add to this as well …

Thanks,
andreas

Map position shouldn’t affect outline order, Certainly, export works off the document’s outline even if the main view is map based. Outline order ($OutlineOrder) of notes, within a given container is reflected in the map view via the stack order (the z-axis), i.e. for overlapping notes, which is drawn in front of the other.

Whether notes appear on a map has no effect on export as that is controlled by $HTMLDontExport and $HTMLExportChildren.

†. Be aware though that moving or promoting/demoting notes in outline may result in an unexpected change in the note’s map position. If a move happens in outline view, by accident, use ‘undo’ rather than manually correct the move to avoid the change of map position.

thank you @mwra. That explains it well.

I am still interested in the thoughts behind choosing “Separator”-Container over non-Separator-Container, @Bernard-0.

Kind regards

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  1. and is there a way, of exporting to Markdown as well @Bernard-0 ?
  2. and how to handle footnotes: creating them in each note? using the markdown-language?

See here,I just put up some simplified exporting to markdown examples: Exporting a file so that each note in the file becomes a MD file - #5 by satikusala

There are a number of way to handle footnotes. We can review these on the next Patron call if you’d like. A few months back I devised a handful of ways for auto number footnotes.

That’s great, @satikusala. But does this apply for the “Tinderbox Scholar” Template as well?

Yes, it most certainly will/would. If you paste in the templates you need to make some modifications. Specifically add the user-generated attributes that my templates requires, $IsNoShowTitle, $IsNoShowText, $IsNoShowTitle, $HeadingOffset, $HeadingDepth, $Author, $Subtitle, $DateToday. You’ll need to adjust your Pandoc path as well. You may want to adjust the insertion of the author name, as Pandoc processes each not individual (can discuss this in detail at some later point).

Keep in mind. The Scholar template is an amazing example of the flexibility of TBX. The scholar template provides a tremendous number of customizable elements, all of which many people won’t need or ever use. So, don’t be afraid to dial back some of the customizations if you feel you’re getting overwhelmed.

Yes, it certainly would. It will depend on how you set up your attributes files, the use of templates, etc. Not to take away from the scholar template by saying this, but it is just that, a template. Templates and action code can be pasted into it, likewise the steps, methods, and ideas can be pulled out of it and put into other files.

You’re more than welcome, @andreas. This was fun to make. I conceived it for writing my thesis, but I switched to Scrivener for this purpose. My new master-template, that I use for new projects, is already very different. I will try to share it sometime in the near future, but there are many things to document for others to make sense of it.

There is no special reason for keeping the notes under a container that is a separator. I was working mainly on the outline (there was a bug that affected the note position in map-view if I moved it in outline view, so I stoped using map-view. This was fixed in the last beta version that should be publicly released sometime in the near future, I think).

To add footnotes, I used to use an applescript. See this file, and I think you’ll be able to make sense of it. You’ll need to run the script in script editor or with some other software (Keyboard Maestro, Alfred, etc.) due to a new bug with the runCommand action (probably caused by macOS).

Footnotes.tbx (110.5 KB)

If you have other questions, I can try to answer them.

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Nice idea, I see how this stamp will automatically generate a foot note in the markdown format when applied. You still have to manually enter this note in your text I see.

I have another approach I’ll share on my Friday Patron session. The footnotes are automatically numbered based on their place in the document outline. That way you can move your text around and the footnotes will get renumbered. More on this later.

Thanks for this. I could not figure out why my osascript run commends had stopped working.

BRW, if you use the new “Shortcuts” app you can create an AppleScript shortcut and then use something like this in you action code, i.e. you tell it to run the name of your shortcut.

runCommand(shortcuts run "TBX and OmniFocus Create Project 1");

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Hey Michael, this is the same file I sent you early last year (around May, I think). I couldn’t find my latest version of it. I remembered I had sent it to you per forum msg, so that’s where I got it from :smile: You are right, the approach is outdated, and there are many possible improvements, which I didn’t pursue because it felt like reinventing the wheel, and something I couldn’t afford to do.

My current take on this is that Tinderbox is amazingly flexible, but nowadays, I try to use it for things that would be more work in other apps instead of less. In most writing apps, creating working footnotes that will export adequately is trivial. And, despite the effort I put into Tinderbox Scholar, I can achieve the same thing more easily using Scrivener (with the aid of Pandoc or the built-in compile options).

That is not to say that trying to recreate these functionalities in Tinderbox isn’t great fun and a way to learn new things.

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how to get hold on of this Friday-Patron-Session-Insight @satikusala?

and yet: seing Tinderbox and Scrivener working more tightly connected seems just the next logical step. same is true for Tinderbox and Devonthink. @satikusala that would be a nice topic for one of the upcoming Tinderbox-Meetups. I would even try to contribute to that.

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As a patron of mine, I emailed it to you last month. My plan is to the publicly share the patron session a month later, so here you go: Tinderbox Lesson - Becker's July 2022 Session with his Patrons.

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