Exporting an outline

Exporting an outline

Exporting is different from saving; it creates a new copy of your file on the disk, leaving the original file open on the screen. The new file will lose its OmniOutliner-specific formatting if it is exported in a different format.

Plain Text, Rich Text, and Apple Keynote export formats have settings in OmniOutliner's preferences which let you specify how to represent outlines in the exported format.

The available file formats are as follows:

OmniOutliner 3, OmniOutliner 3 Template, and OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) are the same formats that are available when saving an outline.

Exporting to the version 2 format will cause you to lose any version 3-specific formatting.

Apple Keynote

This turns the Topic column of your outline into an Apple Keynote presentation. When exporting to Keynote, each top-level (level 1) item in the outline gets its own slide which contains the item's descendants as bullet points. Open the exported presentation in Keynote to revise it or apply a theme to it.

Plain Text (fixed width)

This approximates your outline as a plain text file, making each column the same width so that everything lines up nicely for viewing by humans. Settings for plain text exporting are available in the Text preferences.

You can choose which columns to export, and set their width. Select File ‣ Page Setup..., then from the Settings pop-up menu select OmniOutliner, and then click the Columns tab. Double-click a column width value to edit it.

Plain Text (with tabs)

This approximates your outline as a plain text file, using tab characters to separate columns. This doesn't necessarily look very nice to the human eye, but many applications can easily import tab-delimited text files. Settings for plain text exporting are available in the Text preferences.

Plain Text (MORE 3.1)

This approximates your outline as a plain text file that is readable by the outlining application MORE 3.1. Settings for plain text exporting are available in the Text preferences.

RTF (Rich Text Format)

This approximates your outline as a rich text file, using rulers and Unicode characters. TextEdit and Microsoft® Word are common applications that understand rich text. Settings for rich text exporting are available in the RTF Export preferences.

RTFD (Rich Text Format with Attachments)

Rich text files can contain file attachments; if you choose this option your exported file will contain the same file attachments as your outline. Settings for rich text exporting are available in the RTF Export preferences.

Your exported outline will be formatted as a hypertext document. JavaScript functionality will be built in to allow items to be expanded or collapsed by clicking their handles.

HTML

Your exported outline will be formatted as a hypertext document like the dynamic HTML export, but without the JavaScript trick that allows items to be expanded and collapsed.

Your exported outline will be formatted as a hypertext document similar to the kind used by Microsoft® Word.