Since I’m already on the topic of Import (see my earlier post on the Import Utility), let me also tell you about how powerful the insert menu features are when it comes to importing text or RTF in WhizFolders. If you are a programmer and can create text files by scripts, you can also finely control the Insert text feature to even insert a tree of topics with rich text.
Take a look at the Insert menu in WhizFolders. Here, I will be mainly discussing the first two menu operations.
MENU OPERATION 1. Insert Text Files as Topics: Although, it says “text files,” it does support inserting RTF files too. This feature alone can give a head start to new users when importing their notes created with notepad and wordpad in the form of TXT and RTF files. Just use this menu and it gives you a file selection dialog. You can select multiple files in there. So if your TXT or RTF files are in a single folder, you can just select all of them and they will be imported, each as a separate topic.
A nice feature to get printout of program sources:
If you think about it, the above feature can be put to good use. If you understand text files, you also know that many types of files are also text files. For example, htm, html and js files that make up a web site are all text files. If you are a web designer and want to take a printout of all your web site source files, just insert them into WhizFolders by this operation so that each gets inserted as a separate topic. Then by using the powerful printing features in WhizFolders, you can get a complete printout of your source files, complete with a table of contents. If you are a programmer, you can get a complete printout of your program modules, source files like PAS, CPP, C, HPP, H, ASPX, and so on. This makes WhizFolders a developer’s or programmer’s tool to get a nice listing of sources.
MENU OPERATION 2. Insert Topics from Text File: If you have a large text file that you want broken into separate topics, you can insert a line beginning with topic: in various places followed by the topic name that you want to give to that piece. For example:
topic: topic name 1 this is the text of the first topic and can have many lines. topic: topic name 2 this is the text of the 2nd topic and can have many lines.
Then use that file with this operation and you will get your text split into topics at the places you inserted the names. If you already have some lines beginning with a fixed word other than “topic:,” followed by topic name, you can change the operation slightly to look for that word. This will help when some other program exports text in such a way and you want to import it in WhizFolders, split into topics. WhizFolders itself uses this format when you Export a text file from the Tools menu from your notes. It splits the topics by the Topic: prefix. If you have files in some other format and it is difficult and tedious to insert topic names, you can look at the import utility described in this blog and see if that will help you in some way. If it doesn’t, let me know and I might add a new import feature in the utility. If you are a programmer, look at the next section and perhaps, you can do that job yourself.
Programmers can make this operation do wonders!
If you are a programmer and can generate text files by scripts, you can combine information from various places into one text file such that the import operation automatically creates topics in the document. Here are some tips related to this.
Tip 1: The pieces can have RTF! If you want a topic to have RTF, put the complete RTF code after the line that begins with “topic: a-topic-name”. Here is an example:
topic: topic name 1
this is the text of the first topic and can have many lines.
topic: an rtf topic
{rtf... the rtf code of the topic having many lines.
}
topic: topic name 2
this is the text of the 2nd topic and can have many lines.
The topic “an rtf topic” will be imported as an RTF (rich text) topic. Some users have made very useful WhizFolder documents this way by generating these text files by programs. For example, Steve Jarjoura (a user) made a Calendar document. See http://whizfolders.com/calendar.aspx. Another user, Carl Haddick, is using a very old machine to create some text files which he then imports into WhizFolders by converting into this format by a script. He also converted some exported text from another note organizer into WhizFolders by using this feature and a programming script.
Tip 2: You can make a tree of topics by using level specifiers (version 6.3 or later only). To make levels in the topic list, just append a line “~level: n” after the “topic: topic-name” line in the import text file. The topmost level is level 0. Here is an example of such an import:
Topic: Top level topic 1 ~level: 0 Content of this topic. Content of this topic. Content of this topic. Content of this topic. Topic: Child 1 ~level: 1 This is a child topic. Topic: Child of Child 1 ~level: 2 This is a child topic. Topic: Top level topic 2 ~level: 0 Content of this topic. Content of this topic.
The possibilities are endless if you are a programmer. But if you are not, you can ask me for help, and I can put that intelligence in the Import Utility.
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