Export tools

[lusid 24]

Looking for a good tool to export my notes to simple txt or rtf.   I was on the fence at $3/month, at $4 I'm out. I only use sync and search, but I have lots and lots of devices, so I'll go back to using discrete files and some random file sync service.

But I need to get my data back into a standard editable text format.  html doesn't count.

Suggestions?

 

[gazumped 11,661]

Hi.  It's possible to print notes to file if you need to do that..

[lusid 24]

Thanks for responding.  My post was stuck in moderation for so long I lost track of it.  Printing to file gives me a postscript file with much more markup than the html exported variant.

What I ended up doing was using a 3rd party widget (ever2simple) to bulk convert my notes to text format.  It took some manual cleanup to get them renamed and organized into a dropbox folder tree, but I am back to having usable notes on all my devices.  The downside being I have to use device specific editors and rely on the search capabilities of each device, but solving that problem was not worth $4/month.

[gazumped 11,661]

I believe that if you do your own OCR (or save text notes) Basic or Plus would have given you a search feature.

[freediverx 2]

It's absurd to have to jump through such hoops to get access to one's own data. Rule of thumb: if a company is so insecure about its product offerings that it feels compelled to limit data migration options, perhaps this is not a company you want to entrust with your data.

[DTLow 5,736]

9 hours ago, freediverx said:

It's absurd to have to jump through such hoops to get access to one's own data.

I'm not clear on what hoops you're jumping through.
I simply right-click, and select export.

>>Rule of thumb: if a company is so insecure about its product offerings that it feels compelled to limit data migration options, perhaps this is not a company you want to entrust with your data.

That's good advise.  Before I committed to using Evernote, I made sure that I could easily export my data.  I'm satisfied with the Evernote export options

[jefito 5,589]

8 hours ago, freediverx said:

It's absurd to have to jump through such hoops to get access to one's own data. Rule of thumb: if a company is so insecure about its product offerings that it feels compelled to limit data migration options, perhaps this is not a company you want to entrust with your data.

But to export to any format a user desires may not be an easy or desirable thing. Evernote notes are closest to HTML (and you can export to that, and yes, you keep your own data); and text isn't adequate to represent HTML: what if they have attachments or embedded images? Should text export just drop them on the ground? How many export data formats should it support?

That being said, HTML is a well-known format, and surely conversion tools exist. A web search on "convert html to text" turned up a fair number of links; seems like this one might be a starting point: https://www.w3.org/Tools/html2things.html