Easy export of notes? Drag and drop?

I have some notes in Zotero for several hundred items. I'd like to export them instead as .txt (or similar) files. I can do this manually, but it would save time if I could just drag and drop to a folder where my item is stored.

Currently (on a Mac) if I drag and drop I get a "XXXXX.textClipping" version of the note, which even if renamed to .txt ends up with formatting information I don't need. I can view the 'textClipping' format in a special window but I'd rather just have a .txt or other standard format.

Ideas?
  • Selecting them all and generating a report doesn't work for your purposes?
    Then I think looking at which export format (RIS? CSV?) includes notes' full text with little else might be the best option -- I don't know that off hand.
  • Unfortunately that wouldn't work for what I'm doing. Thanks for the suggestion though.

    I'd like to save each of them individually to a different location.

    (Specifics: I have a unique folder for each of my references, and I'm currently "retiring" a bunch of old notes in Zotero that are no longer relevant to how I organize my references in Zotero but might be helpful at some point in the future for re-reading those references.)
  • You can select multiple notes and drag them to a text editor, and then split them into separate files based on the dividing lines. We can help with a command line to do that if necessary.
  • @dstillman, thanks. I solved my immediate problem by exporting as a CSV (with notes), cleaning up the format (both removing many columns, and also then removing HTML codes from the notes, etc.), and then running my own script to save multiple files from that output (based on author-name plus year), and then copying over those text files into my other folders.

    As a minor feature, it would be great if the notes dragged and dropped out of Zotero as .txt (or similar) files, but my problem is solved and I probably won't run into it again.
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