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Importing and Exporting

How does one publish or distribute a VoodooPad document?

Beyond just emailing the VoodooPad document itself (which only works if the recipient also has the application), VoodooPad gives us other ways to export our work for distribution:

Let's try these one at a time.

Exporting as RTFD

First, create a folder on your desktop or in your home folder in which to do some playing. For purposes of our discussion, we'll call it VDTemp but you can call it any other name you can remember.

If you've closed the LinksAndPages.vpdoc VoodooPad document, let's open it again. When it's open, choose File->Export->Export as RTFD files... Navigate the resulting File Save sheet to your new folder, VDTemp, then click the Export button.

Now open a Finder window into the VDTemp folder. You should see four documents in the folder:

If you double click on the Index.rtfd document, it should open in TextEdit as a Rich Text document containing the content of the page named VoodooPad from our LinksAndPages.vpdoc VoodooPad document.

Notice that all of the links that were present on that page in LinksAndPage.vpdoc are present here, but though they look like links, they're not. That's because TextEdit doesn't support links between TextEdit documents.

Instead of creating a single document with an arbitrary page order, VoodooPad creates a set of documents, one for each page, in a folder. You can reorder them and print them in any order you desire, rather than having an arbitrary order forced on you.

When you've examined those pages sufficiently, throw them in the trash (or drag them to some other folder) to clear the VDTemp folder for our next experiment.

Exporting as Plain Text

Next, let's try exporting as plain text. Once again, click on the LinksAndPages.vpdoc to make it active. This time choose File->Export->Export as Text files... Once again navigate the resulting Save File sheet to our VDTemp folder and click the Export button.

Go back to the Finder window (or open a new one) in the VDTemp folder. Notice now that we have four files named the same as before, except this time they have the .txt suffix. Let's double click on Index.txt to open it again in TextEdit and examine its contents.

This time we see the same content that was in our Index page, but all in the same font with no font styles and no apparent links, not even simulated links. This should not be a surprise, since this was created as a plain text document. So if your only interest is in the content of your pages without regard to any formatting, this would be the appropriate export method.

Exporting as XML

Once again, clear the VDTemp folder for our next experiment. This time, choose File->Export->Export as XML..., navigate the Save File sheet to the VDTemp folder and click Save. When we go back to our Finder window in VDTemp, we have a small surprise. Instead of four files, one for each page in the original document, we only have a single file named after the VoodooPad document and suffixed with ".xml".

Double clicking on this file could lead to various results depending on what applications you've installed that can open XML files. To make your results predictable so we can examine the file together, first open the TextEdit application (if it's not already open) and from its File menu, choose File->Open. Navigate the resulting File Open dialog box to our VDTemp folder and open the LinksAndPages.xml document.

It's beyond the scope of this tutorial to delve very deeply into what we're seeing here. It's legitimate XML, so if you're familiar with the XML format, the content of this open file might make some sense to you. For our purposes, it's sufficient to expose the file and add that this method of export works for at least two purposes:

If you are a developer and have worked with XML formatted files, you'll recognize from this latter point that XML provides a medium for generated documents that may be directly imported into VoodooPad.

Exporting to Your iPod

If you don't have an iPod, you can skip this section, but if you have one, then plug it in.
Once your iPod shows up in the Finder, choose File->Export->Export to iPod. Once this command has completed, eject your iPod and navigate using the scroll wheel to Extras->Notes. Next you will see the name of your document listed, and when clicked on using the scroll wheel, you'll see your index page show up on the pod, with links! To move around through your document on the iPod, use the scroll wheel to move up and down.

You will notice that sometimes a link has a dark underline, while all the other ones have a light grey underline. When a link is dark, you can use the iPod button in the middle of the scroll wheel to move to that page on your iPod, just like you would when clicking on a link in VoodooPad.

Exporting to the Web

For our final exporting exercise, choose File->Export->Web Export... which will display the Web Export Manager panel. On this panel, choose RTFD in the Export Format popup menu. Next, click the Choose... button to the far right of "Output directory:". When the Open dialog sheet appears, navigate it to our VDTemp folder and click Open. Leave the rest of the panel controls as they were and click the Export button. When you see the phrase, "Finished exporting" to the far left of the three buttons, Reset, Close and Export, then click the Close button.

Go back to the Finder window (or open a new one) in the VDTemp folder. Notice that we have four files, as before, but this time with ".html" suffixes. If you double click on index.html, a page should open in your web browser with the content of our Index page showing links. If you click on any of the links, it should take you to the page comparable to that page in VoodooPad.

It's important to recognize that though we are seeing the same content and clicking links with the same functionality, we are doing all of this in a web browser and using .html files, not the VoodooPad document. If we made a change to our VoodooPad document at this point, we wouldn't see the corresponding change in the web browser unless we exported again into the same folder.

In fact, while keeping our web browser open, let's do that. Go back to our work area in VoodooPad and click on the Home button in the Toolbar. On the Index page, add the following indented line to the bottom of the page.

This is a line not yet reflected in our web pages.

and click the Save button in the Toolbar. The line is now saved in our VoodooPad document, but should not be seen in our web version. To confirm that, let's go back to the Finder window and double click on the index.html file to reopen it in our web browser. The page that opens should be our Index page, but there should be no indication of the last line we added. Once again, keeping the page open in our web browser, go back to the Work Area in VoodooPad and choose Web export...

The Web Export Manager panel should already be set up the way we want it, but to be sure, check that the Output directory is our VDTemp folder. Now click the Export button. When you see the phrase, "Finished exporting" to the far left of the three buttons, Reset, Close and Export, then click the Close button.

Now if we go back to our web browser page and click the Reload button which looks like this in Safari:

...then we should see the last line appear. In other words, we've just updated our little local web site with the new content from VoodooPad.

The other settings for web exporting in the Web Export Manager panel can be found in the VoodooPad manual under the Help menu.

Exporting to the Web makes our document easier to distribute widely than the printed page. It is easily reviewed by anyone who has a web browser, and today, that includes nearly everyone using computers. Finally, it retains its dynamic organization of pages, in which each page is related to the others through hyperlinks rather than through some sort of simulated physical proximity.

Importing

Now that we've seen how to get information out of a VoodooPad document in several different formats, the next natural concern is how to get information into the document. The most obvious answers, of course, are to do what we've been doing, that is, type or paste the information in. However, we have other options, including:

On to Editing Text