zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Michael Spranger
<mikeitsecurity@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I have a goal to migrate from M$ products to open source.  One of
> those is OneNote to Zim.  One major hurdle I am facing is that when I
> copy notes from a OneNote page to a Zim notebook, the text and whatnot
> copies fine, but once I've done the copy, and I click on the text or
> picture in the Zim notebook, big flashing black bars appear either on
> the right or the left and I am not able to maneuver around on  any of
> the text.

What happens is that the content is actually pasted as one big image -
the "flashing black bar" is the text cursor blown up to the size of
the image.

As noted as well by Derek I have seen this issue with multiple MS
products. The problem is that the content type (e.g. text or image) is
negotiated between both applications. If OneNote tells zim it prefers
to paste an image, zim happily complies. We can not easily solve this
because zim does not know what program is on the other side, so might
just as well be a program that has a good reason to paste images.

> I know a work around would be to copy all of that to
> notepad, for example, and then to Zim, but any pictures I've added
> from training would not copy and the indented bullet lists all lose
> their indentations.  I would appreciate any assistance on this, as I
> would really like to make this work!

There is another problem here - even if we solve the one above: at the
moment you can only paste either text or images to zim, but not both
at the same time. The reason is that zim and OneNote do not have a
common source format that we can use pasting combined text and images.

So after fixing the problem mentioned above the result will be that
pasting directly in zim looks the same as pasting to notepad does now.

So afraid I do not have a ready solution for you.

Looking at OneNote, the only export format I see that may be useful is
the html export to a self contained html file. We could try to whip up
a script to import such a file, but will require some coding to
convert the HTML encoding into zim wiki format.

Regards,

Jaap