Export to flat text (using Workflowy to draft documents)
Request: option to flatten text when exporting (i.e. remove bullets and indentation)
Use case: I frequently use Workflowy to draft long documents - emails, articles, reports and so on. When getting the finished text back out of Workflowy into an email app or Word processor, I'm faced with a problem: I no longer need all the indentation or bullet points as I don't want the reader to see all that structure - they only need to see the final text.
I see that others have been struggling with this for years - see Adam Pearson's request here, for example.
There are messy workarounds for this (e.g. copying text into Word or Pages and then playing with formatting until the bullets and indentation are removed) but it would be much slicker and more useful to have an export option that removed the bullets and indentation but also inserted blank lines between sections. It would also be great to be able to embolden section headings (i.e. all the text that had been in top-level bullets before flattening).
Look forward to hearing others' thoughts.
Thanks!
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This would be one of the single, best improvements in WF for me. Been using WF for years to draft articles (I'm an academic) and longer pieces. It's wonderful for drafting, but with no easy export into word processor types, it's a pain to then manually indent and/or remove bullets. I've tried the different export options, and none of them do this well.
It's actually what I had in mind when I suggested this:Two new views that would be killer: document view and presentation view https://workflowy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360062804031-Two-new-views-that-would-be-killer-document-view-and-presentation-view
You add the ability to create a document view that can be exported easily (even by copy/paste) into a word processor of some form (Word, Google Docs, etc) to the upcoming bi-directional linking capability (for citations), this becomes a beast for academic work without all the pomp that surrounds Roam Research. Bonus points if there was an easy / command to add a footnote style reference! -
Yeah... From everything that's been in this and other chains what it really sounds like is we need/want a fairly capable export formatter. I wonder how hard that would be to do. Once the script is written it should be fairly easy to maintain and it could just go on a website or something. Then you export from WorkFlowy, plug it into the website, tell it how you want it formatted and done.
Think it's worth the effort?
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In my experience the easiest workaround is to copy and paste the formatted text, manually remove all bullets in word and then apply styles over the text. Works ok, except for the indentation. This keeps bolding ,italics etc intact
but yeah, native support would be much better and this seems to me like a common use case
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Ha! "pomp"! That's a perfect description of the attitude I've seen from Roam.
There is a way to export flat. I've seen it somewhere before... I know @Frank knows the combo but basically you get the export menu open, copy and then paste with crtl+shift+v. I think? You're supposed to drop indents and bullets that way.
What I would *MURDER* for is the ability to drop only the bullets. Then I'd be able to write code in WorkFlowy!
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I am an academic as well. I love using workflowy for project development, management and communication across a team. It is a terrific platform for capturing, organizing and refining ideas. I would adopt it as a team writing platform if there was a seamless export. I would love a markdown export. I understand that great features like the fractal boards might make this complex. Perhaps a section of a workflowy list with no boards or certain features turned off could be used to simplify the export problem.
How about text soap to clean the export to remove bullets
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That would be a completely acceptable work around for me. Ideally, I'd love some form of document view built in like the fractal boards. Then, I could still screen share in Zoom meetings and easily switch back and forth while working on something prior to final export.
However, for want of a document view, an extra step like an export formatter as you suggest, Alfred, would make light work of manually removing bullet points and creating paragraphs on long-form writing. I'd welcome it.
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