I frequently contribute product reviews to the NosillaCast, a "technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias" put out by my friend Allison Sheridan. She insists that reviews must be submitted in both audio as well as text form, so that those with disabilities can participate. Being a low vision user myself, I applaud this decision.
When working on a writing project of any length, I always use the Omni Group's excellent OmniOutliner to organize my thoughts, so I figured that once I've organized my outline to my satisfaction and fleshed it out, it would serve as a good set of show notes to send along with my audio review. Unfortunately, OmniOutliner's export formats leave much to be desired; none of them produce output that Allison can use without heavy editing.
I was hemming and hawing about how to solve this particular problem when I realized that, hey, I'm a developer; surely I could put together some sort of tool to turn OmniOutliner's output into a usable, simple HTML document. (I'm not sure why I didn't realize this until sooner!) It also gave me an excuse to "get my hands dirty" with Apple's new programming language, Swift. About half an hour later, I put together a (IMHO) rather nice tool that produces simple, indented HTML using the OPML format which OmniOutliner can export to.
Export your outline from OmniOutliner (File -> Export...) and be sure and choose the
"OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language)" format. Now run opml2html in a Terminal
window. The usage is as follows:
Usage: opml2html [options]
-f, --input-file:
Path to the input file. (Required)
-o, --output-file:
Path to the output file. (Optional, default = <filename without extension>.html)
-l, --full-mode:
Create full HTML output (including <head>, etc.)
-h, --help:
Prints a help message.
The only mandatory command line argument is -f (or --input-file), which tells the
tool what file to read from. By default, the output gets stored into a file named
the same as the original filename, but with .html instead of .opml as its extension.
(So running the tool on a file foo.opml would place the results in a foo.html file
in the same directory as the original file.) This can be changed using the -o or
--output-file argument. Finally, the -f or --full-mode creates a fully-formed
HTML file (including <HEAD>, <BODY>, etc. tags.) By default the tool only outputs
the HTML necessary for rendering the outline.
This project includes Ben Gollmer's Swift CommandLine library as a dependency (using git submodules.) You must install it before you can build this project. This is pretty easy to do however; just run the following commands.
git submodule init
git submodule update
This software is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.
Copyright (c) 2015 Donald Burr <dburr@DonaldBurr.com>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Uses Ben Gollmer's Swift CommandLine library.