Bulk import rich text notes from iOS filed under "FROM MY PC" (ie not synced to an e-mail account)?

madscijr

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Oct 22, 2015, 4:12:43 PM10/22/15

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Hi Tiddlywikers,

Has anyone tried transferring notes, created in Apple's default Notes app on their iPhone or iPad, to their computer (I'm in Windows), to ultimately be imported in TiddlyWiki? (I haven't got that far yet, but will probably write a VBA or Python or Perl script to concatenate the notes into a pure store XML file that can be imported into TiddlyWiki. I've done that sort of thing before.)

For a long time, the Notes app just supported plain text, and you could sync them to Outlook's notes through iTunes. I wrote a VBA macro in Outlook to save all the notes to text files (getting the file name from the first non-blank line of the note, massaging out unfriendly characters for the file name, etc.)

However, now iOS' Notes app supports (yay) rich text. Which is fine if you file the note under an e-mail account, because then you can get it onto your computer with an e-mail client (I would use Outlook on the PC and similar to above, write a VBA macro to simply export the messages in the Notes folder to files in HTML format, and save any attachments or images to the same folder. Importing those into TiddlyWiki would probably be a little more complicated because you might want to convert the HTML into TW markup, or you could embed the content inside <html>...</html> which might have some hiccups, and any image references would need to point to whatever local folder you keep your TiddlyWiki image files in).

Since the rich text support came along, I have filed most of my notes under a linked e-mail account. However, before I realized that there might be a problem syncing the notes to a Windows PC, wrote a bunch of rich text notes filed under the default "FROM MY PC", which to my knowledge only syncs to Outlook's notes, which are plain text.

So my question is, does anyone know any bulk method of transferring the iOS rich text notes to PC, that preserves the formatting and images?

I could manually e-mail all my notes to myself but there are a couple hundred at least, and the experience could be time-consuming.

Or I could seek out a friend who has a Mac and try transferring the notes to their computer (I would think Apple supports that natively for OS X) and then convert the notes to RTF or some PC-friendly format.

Any help appreciated...

madscijr

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Oct 22, 2015, 4:24:19 PM10/22/15

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PS one possible workaround is to activate Notes for iCloud, then you can possibly access them through your iCloud account via an e-mail client. Not sure if the "FROM MY PC" notes get associated with the iCloud mailbox when you activate it, but I can give it a try...

Tobias Beer

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Oct 22, 2015, 6:04:29 PM10/22/15

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Hi madscijr,

I would say, eventually you have to make up your mind which system you want to use.

You can use the IOS notes app as but an inbox,

and then revise that inbox to transfer stuff into your TiddlyWiki notebook,

or whichever other target, e.g. trello.
However, if that's your workflow, I'd not put any formatting or imagery

into those notes but rather link it.
No idea how hard it is to get an image back out of a note in an orderly, semi-automatic manner.

Actually, ever since trello came along I'm pretty much done with everything else, note wise.
It's just too easy to put stuff away in an orderly fashion and then work on it later.

Ever tried to just paste the clipboard contents being html in a TW5?

Try it. Well, you get halfway decently formatted content, but it's ridiculously verbose html.

As for any importing utilities, I wouldn't know of or use any,

especially none that preserve formatting or even images.
If you get a hold of the underlying html of a note, you can pretty much paste that into TiddlyWiki5...

the <html> put it here </html> syntax is for TWC only...

but perhaps that's what you're using.

Best wishes,

— tb

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