Using Tinderbox for writing
As I mentioned in this post, I use Tinderbox for quite a lot of my writing. It’s possible to include images inside your tinderbox notes, but I’ve always been a bit reluctant to do this I guess partly because I don’t want my tinderbox document to get too big or slow to use. Also, I quite like the idea of having the images somewhere else in case I need to update them. Up to now, for my thesis, I’ve just been putting in a marker with the name of the image file that should go there. When I want to make a properly formatted document, I export from Tinderbox as text, then paste this into a new word processor document and insert the images by hand.
This is becoming a bit of a nuisance, though, and I’d like to have an automatic way of inserting all the images. To summarize, this is what I’m hoping to achieve:
1. compose the document, note by note or paragraph by paragraph, inside Tinderbox, using its great facilities to work on and understand the structure of the whole thing.
2. include placeholder text about the images and figures that should be present in the final version
3. include placeholder text for references that should have the appropriate text (Jones 1998) in the text, and should be included in the bibliography at the end
4. export sections, chapters or the full thing to get a single readable document
5. import into a word processor for final formatting, page numbering and tidying up, this process should include the automatic replacement of the placeholders with the images or the references as appropriate.
Even if this only worked for drafts of the thesis, it would mean that I could quickly generate something that’s quite readable and includes figures and references but at the same time do the actual writing work with Tinderbox in the way that I’ve become used to.
This is what I’ve come up with…
This morning I realised that both Apple’s Pages.app and TextEdit.app will open .html documents, at the same time placing images inline. Using instructions that I found here, I’ve been able to write a simple export template for Tinderbox which adds everything together into one long document with headings for each section. If I make the placeholder text for the images just an html ‘img’ tag pointing to the file on my computer then the images magically appear in the word processor document. Pages.app even resizes the images to fit the document.
For references, I’ve already been inserting the correct code for EndNote to be able to build the bibliography (something like {Jones, 1998 #291} ) which is part way there. (Brigid and I made notes about this on the wiki here some time ago). EndNote will find these codes within a Microsoft Word document and create the bibliography as you work with it. Alternatively, newer versions of EndNote can scan a .rtf file and insert a bibliography at the end.
So my proposed workflow is:
1: write the document with tinderbox, including the ‘img’ tags for image files and {reference} placeholders
2: export as .html with my new template
3: open the document using Pages.app or TextEdit.app
4: save as .rtf
5: create the bibliography using EndNote’s .rtf document scan
This is still not ideal, because EndNote won’t scan an .rtfd file- rich text format with images. To work around this you have to use ‘show package contents’ then move the file called TXT.rtf out of the package, scan it with EndNote then put it back in – a bit of a nuisance, but doable…