I have many MS Word documents with bulleted lists. After pasting these in Bike I can successfully do a Find for the bullet + tab symbols that came from Word, but I can’t seem to find a way to tell the Replace in Bike to simply apply an indent (like e.g. in Word you can do a Replace All with ^t as the replace content). Any suggestions?
If I copy a nest of MS Word bullets like this:
and paste into Bike, I find that the outline structure is preserved, but we get unwanted prefixes (an exotic bullet character followed by a tab)
We could write a script to clean those out in the clipboard, before pasting, but in the meanwhile, with Search and Replace (⌘F) set to the Regular Expression (.*) option, we can replace the pattern ^.\t (at start of line, single char + tab) with an empty string:
But perhaps the problem you need to solve is really that the Alpha in the example above is not indented under MS Word bullet outline ?
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Thanks, nice to have a single command to find any bulleted item even with exotic characters and replace it with basically nothing.
But you are right, the indenting can have multiple errors eve if only one layer nesting:
With multiple layers things there are more issues:
Any other suggestions?
There are various ways of mapping from the structure of MSWord to that of Bike.
In Bike itself, the transition from a normal paragraph to a first-level bulleted paragraph might be marked by a change of paragraph type (See Format > Row > Unordered List) rather than by a change of indentation level:
but perhaps the mapping you are looking for would be one in which imported paras all have the same type, and top-level bullet status simply becomes an additional level of indent ?
A component of a possible solution, particularly if the .docx files are numerous, might be batch docx →html conversion with Pandoc, which is free to install.
With Pandoc installed, possibly with HomeBrew, and from a directory containing .docx files, a command line incantation like:
pandoc -f docx -t html bulleted.docx -o bulleted.html
would create a bulleted.html file which you can first view in a browser:
and then
- Open in Bike, and
- Save As (⌥⇧⌘S) to create a
.bikeversion.
Or, of course, copy from the browser version, and paste, but it might be better for us to draft you a script to combine a few such steps.
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Thanks. What I was really looking for is multiple sub levels that mimic what I had in .docx files. I tried to install Pandoc as a .pkg file but that didn’t work for some reason in Sequoia. As I’m not that tech savvy with command line etc. I’ll give up for now unless there an easy solution would become available. In the meantime, I’ll do some manual cleanup for the most urgent Word files that I need to import.