zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 3:58 PM, Alessandro Magni <magni@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  sorry if it's the wrong place to ask:
>
> I just discovered this wiki and find it very promising for what I'd like to
> do - a simple way to manage my workplace.
>
> My problem - and I'd like to know if Zim can solve it - is to take my
> workplace, i.e. my work directory structure, and in some way import into the
> wiki, in such a way that for each folder in my directory structure I would
> have a Zim node.
> I really cannot do it manually, since my folder structure is a child of many
> years of work, and the current output of: find /0ale/ -type d | wc gives me
> 11875 folders :-)

As you mention zim uses plain text files for the pages. However there
is a header of a few lines on the top of each file. You can do two
things

1) Just put all text files in a folder and open that folder as a zim notebook.

Zim will miss config files and prompt you to update the notebook.
Doing so will add headers to all text files. The disadvantage is that
for such a large structure this may take a long time and maybe not so
easy to check progress.

2) First create an empty notebook and than add files using a small
script to add the headers.

Advantage is that you control the process. Disadvantage is that you
need to do a bit hacking yourself.

Couple of notes that may apply for both cases:
* To avoid waiting a long time for the index to build you can run "zim
--index /path" in the terminal to rebuild a sane index of all files.
* Any character sequences in your files that conflict with the zim
wiki syntax may have unforseen results

Of course it is wise to have backups when you try this, I would also
advise to put the zim notebook under version control before importing
the data, so it is easier to track and rollback small errors.

Hope this helps,

Jaap