Export notes as plain text

buipet

Hi,

I wonder if there is a solutions or workaround for my problem. I use Zotero to download news articles from Factiva database. When I do this, the text of the article gets saved as a note. I then need to export all the references to another program for analysis. The problem I have is that the notes are all exported in rich text with a lot of html code, which makes many of the articles unusable.

Is there a way to export the notes as plain text? Or convert them to plain text before exporting? Or is there an alternative workaround?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

djross3

Not exactly: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73674/easy-export-of-notes-drag-and-drop

Or convert them to plain text before exporting?

Yes, I'd look into this. See what you can do with your text editor and "Save as..." functions, or copying and pasting.

Note that my question (above) was about doing this on a Mac. It might work out better (or just differently) on a PC, I'm not sure.

buipet

Thanks. But this doesn't quite do it. If there was a setting to have all notes as plain text (I have absolutely no need for rich text), that would be the best option.

I can't find any way to do anything with "save as" and while I can copy the text from a note, there doesn't seem to be any way to paste as plain text, on my PC at least. Is this possible on Mac?

buipet

I just found one way around this problem. This is not ideal as I prefer not to involve other (competing) software. But it works quite well. If I import the exported references into Mendeley, and export them again from Mendeley in RIS format, the notes look to be all turned into plain text. As I said, I prefer not to involve other software, but I will do this until a better solution comes along. Saves me a LOT of time.

djross3

Thanks. But this doesn't quite do it. If there was a setting to have all notes as plain text (I have absolutely no need for rich text), that would be the best option.

I understand. I was telling you that when I recently asked essentially the same question, the answer was 'no'.

Is this possible on Mac?

No, as I said. In fact, it sounds like this works better on a PC because at least you get a rich text format you can edit, if I'm understanding your correctly. So in a text editor (MS Word, for example), you could use "Save as..." and choose .txt (plain text) and get the desired results? Or do you mean that the 'rich text' isn't rich at all but output as code? Because that's what happens on a Mac, which isn't helpful, plus it is placed into an annoying format/container that isn't actually a text file at all but a system-level "text-clipping" as if you saved the clipboard... odd.

Using other software for now, if that works, sounds like a good idea. In my case, I just needed to do this once (to clear out and archive old notes), but it sounds like you may need to do this repeatedly. All the more reason I'd like to see this feature.

buipet

I appreciate your input. Sorry if I misunderstood. Yes maybe copying and pasting to a separate text editor and then back in to Zotero might work. I didn't try that. But since I am looking to do this with hundreds of sources, I much prefer an automated solution. I'll stick with the Mendeley solution for now.