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exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 1:45 am
by Bill
Is there a straightforward way of exporting notes from CintaNotes to Microsoft Word? I suspect there must be, but I can't discover it easily.

I've tried exporting notes first to HTML and XML, but in both cases I get error messages when I try to open those files in Word.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 6:56 pm
by date
Simple 8-). Select the notes in CN, Ctrl-C to copy, switch to Word, Ctrl-V to paste.
If you want the formatting in the text retained export to html and open the exported html in a browser that can copy html (Chrome, firefox...) and copy from there.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 7:03 pm
by Bill
I'm unfortunately only too familiar with copy and paste (I seem to do a lot of it); I just thought there might be some way of exporting a group of notes in CN to Word *without* falling back on Ctl-C and Ctl-V.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 7:30 pm
by date
I meant in the notelist, you select all the notes you want copied at once. Click the one on top, then Shift-Ctrl-End to select the whole list. Better?

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 8:40 pm
by Bill
Thanks for the useful little shortcut, but I'm afraid it doesn't solve the underlying problems.

When, in Word, I try to open an XML file created as an export from CN, I get this error message: "This file has custom XML elements that are no longer supported in Word. Saving the file will remove these elements permanently." If I then save the file in Word, I then get the text with all the XML codes scattered throughout. I thought Word was supposed to interpret XML codes properly and then hide them (i.e. "<ul>Word1</ul> would simply be converted to underlined Word1). Or was I mistaken?

When, again in Word, I try to open an HTML file created as an export from CN, I get this message: "We're sorry. We can't open the document because we found a problem with its contents." And then if I click on the Details button, I see this: "DTD is prohibited."

All this is way over my head, I'm afraid. But the inability to create a straightforward, simple export from CintaNotes to Word strikes me as a serious shortcoming. I'm not especially fond of Word, but everyone seems to use it, so that it has become something approaching a lingua franca.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:39 pm
by date
XML is simply structered text, Word reads Office-structured-XML and CN reads CN-structured-XML, they won't read from one another!

And I'm not sure if Word is able to open html files... if you google for it there seem to exist converters for this. But you can open the html with the browser and copy from the browser.

If you need the formatting and links from the notes, there doesn't seem to exist a more straightforward way I'm afraid. If you just need the text, export to .txt.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:48 pm
by Bill
Right. Thanks again. I had already come more or less to the same conclusion. The most straightforward way of getting text from a substantial group of notes into Word is to export to an HTML file, then copy and paste. That seems to preserve links and most of the formatting. Not ideal, but it works.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 4:39 am
by CintaNotes Developer
Hi Bill,

That Word refuses to open the html seems to be a bug, we'll fix it in the next update.
In the meanwhile, you can do the following: after exporting to html, open it in notepad and in the first line delete from start up until "<html".

Example
Before:
<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>bug2.db</title><meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-16LE" /><style type="text/css">
...


After:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>bug2.db</title><meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-16LE" /><style type="text/css">
...


After that Word will open the file. Hope this helps!

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 1:49 pm
by Bill
Thanks, Alex. I'll look into that.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 2:58 pm
by Bill
A related question, this time about pasting from CintaNotes to Word. When I paste text that includes a Web link, it comes out looking like this:

HathiTrust <cintanotes:///url/http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015073752142>

This is something weirdly nonstandard, and within Word it is no longer clickable. What I would expect, of course, is "HathiTrust" underlined and highlighted in blue, and when I Ctl-clicked it, I would be taken to the HathiTrust site. I find that if I erase "cintanote:///url/" and manually paste the rest of the URL into my Web browser, I can get to the site in question; but surely I shouldn't have to do something as awkward as that?

Am I doing something wrong here?

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 5:45 am
by CintaNotes Developer
This seems to be an unfortunate bug in CintaNotes.
Could you please clarify how the link in the note was created in the first place?

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 3:43 pm
by Bill
I have been lately transferring thousands of bibliographical notes over from MyInfo (by copy and paste, unfortunately), so at first I thought the problem might be connected with MyInfo, but I have now done a further experiment, and that theory falls apart.

Here is a summary of what I did. I often record the "permalinks" of items in the Library of Congress: then if I want to consult one particular catalogue entry again in the future, I can just click on the link in CintaNotes. A few minutes ago I copied a permalink into CN by first typing "{permalink}" in a note, then selecting the word *permalink* with Ctl-Shift-U, and inserting the URL. Within CN itself that gives me exactly what I want: a clickable link that will take me to that record in the Library of Congress online catalogue.

But when I copy and paste that note into Word, once again I get this unsatisfactory result:

{permalink <cintanotes:///url/https://lccn.loc.gov/44019962>}

Please note that MyInfo was not involved in this experiment at all.

Incidentally, I also established to my own satisfaction that the curly brackets are not causing the problem.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 6:44 am
by CintaNotes Developer
Now it's clear, thanks a lot for the clarification!

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 4:12 pm
by Bill
Alex, I'd like to raise again the question of the nonstandard web links that show up when I copy and paste into Word or other programs. Do you intend to deal with this problem soon? I'm uneasy about the notion that all defects in CN will be corrected only in the next major version, because you've hinted repeatedly that that version may still be many months off into the future.

Wouldn't it be possible to have an intermediate upgrade in the meantime that would treat some of the issues that I and others have written about? The web link question may sound trivial, but it turns out to be rather important to me -- and I suspect to some other users as well.

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2018 4:31 pm
by CintaNotes Developer
Hello Bill, sorry for delayed reply.
We plan to issue a number of 3.xx releases before 4.0, with bugfixes. I've marked fixing this bug as priority.
It probably won't make it into 3.12 (~July), but probably will into 3.13 (~August).

Re: exporting notes to Microsoft Word

Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2018 6:18 pm
by Bill
Excellent. Delighted to hear this.