Q: Any way to export an outline, preserving its hierarchical structure?

Saving As text does just that - it cannot retain the formatting other than, in RTF, simple formatting such as tabs.

Word Processing documents can be opened directly in Pages (AppleWorks 6 only), though Panergy Software'sdocXConverter v3.2 ($19.95) can convert Appleworks 5 and 6 Word Processing documents to RTF (though it has been reported that it can only handle documents which contain only text, not those which include images or frames); and the latest version of the free LibreOffice has announced that it can open AppleWorks 6 Word Processing documents: it does appear to be able to handle at least some embedded images.

I've never used outlines: I don't know whether those programs will handle them - Pages would be the most likely bet, but as LibreOffice is free you could try that.

Hello csaw,

as said by Wilnut, Pages will give you the better conversion results.

Concerning the LibreOffice 4.1 parser, it contains code to recognize the outline structures ( with the labels and the indentations ) ; after expanding the collapsed items, it tries to replace the outlines by basic lists ( with same labels and same indentation). I expect that this works most of the time, but this will probably fail also sometimes :-~

Note:

as I will try in some near future to improve a little the reconstruction of graphic shapes' in AppleWorks, I am currently looking for files with contain a lot of graphic shapes, either in a word processing file or in a paint, drawing file...

If you want a complex AW drawing to play with it you are welcome to use this one:

http://rfwilmut.net/share/AWdrawing.zip

Thank Wilmut,

I have just retrieved it.

I see that there remains many things to code which is not too surprising as actually the code supposes that a drawing file only contains one page and it does not really retrieve the position of the different elements which can appear in the same group :-~

The document can be opened in Pages by a slightly roundabout method, and presumably EazyDraw can open it if you use the correct version. More details here:

http://www.wilmut.webspace.virginmedia.com/notes/aw/page3.html

     Just for note,

I think that this is a ClarisWorks file which can also be opened with AppleWorks 6.2.2 ( I just checked) .

It also contains some spreadsheets as attachment, so AppleWorks is probably the best way to see its content...

It's dated 1995 so it would be ClarisWorks 2: it opens easily in AW6 and I was able to convert it to Pages - this is the conversion, though some alterations have been made since 1995:

http://rfwilmut.net/share/Pagesdrawing.zip

I converted it using the method described in the page I linked to above; there were several objects out of place which had to be manually corrected but considering the complexity it did pretty well.

You were perfectly clear about it being text outlines - it's just that we got sidetracked because the whole subject is of interest.

Hello csaw,

> Unfortunately neither LibreOffice nor OpenOffice.org nor Word (2011) matches AppleWorks' handy ability to collapse and expand items, but you can't have everything.

Maybe you can check it the outline mode of Pages is sufficient for what you want to do ( see for instance http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/pages/outline.html )

Hello,

fosnola wrote:

>  Thank Wilmut,

> I have just retrieved it.

>

> I see that there remains many things to code which is not too surprising as actually the

> code supposes that a drawing file only contains one page and it does not really retrieve

> other position if the different elements which can appear in the same group :-~

a small message, just to give some little news. I have done some improvement in this code and the result of this file's conversion can be found in http://www.loria.fr/~alonso/tmp/vid.odt . But do not expect that all conversions will be <<so good>>, ie. there remains some problems in this code which can make many conversions very bad :-~

Note:

as I begin to understand how the main content of a spreadsheet/database are stored and can be retrieved, I try to create a small tool to retrieve this data and convert them in CSV. It may fail on some files (I have only a few files to test) and/or may fail to retrieve some data ; if somebody want to test it (and report problems) , it can be found in  http://sourceforge.net/projects/libmwaw/files/ ( mwawCVSOSX.zip ).