So I have a ton of notes in Apple Notes. It seems like there’s no way to simply drag and drop them into Scrivener. There’s an export to PDF, but it works one note at a time. There’s no way even to select multiple notes… at all. You can’t export them all at once into either one consolidated PDF or into separate PDFs. You have to export one by one.
This is astonishing to me – unless I’m missing something?
I just tried the same thing on Evernote, and drag and drop into Scrivener isn’t possible there either. There’s export available, but to a web page format, which I don’t want.
Is there a “notes” type application (I know there are sooo many these days) which would allow drag and drop into Scrivener?
The main condition that Scrivener requires is a file drop (there is a grey area with text drops, which the system does create a file for, .textClipping). Tools that create files when you drag and drop out of them should all work fine. You will note that if you drag a note from Apple Notes to the desktop… nothing happens, so that’s where the problem is.
So one solution is to not drag from the notes list, but select the contents of the note and drag the text into the binder instead. It’s one extra step, but that’s better than PDF.
You can drag-and-drop multiple notes at once both ways between Notebooks and Scrivener. Internally Notebooks uses .md, .html and .txt file formats; its “Rich text” format is HTML.
With both .md and .html files, you can switch between rendered and code views—I use .md as the code tends to be more readable.
However it can “compile” into various file formats including RTF and DOCX, and can duplicate into those same formats. It can import media files, and if you drag-and-drop them into Scrivener, they go into the research folder. The only thing to beware of is that you need to Opt-Drag to copy between them; if you simply drag a note from Notebooks into Scrivener it is actually moving it out of Notebooks, just as you would be using Finder.
It has an iOS/iPadOS companion, can sync through iCloud, DropBox and other methods. I use iCloud. As it stores all its documents as separate files on disk, together with a .plist file for each “Book”, they are accessible using any text editor if necessary.
Downside (if it matters to you)? £33 on Mac (direct sale, also available on MacApp store); App Store from £3.40 up (depending how generous you feel!).
Dang. Just dragging the selected text itself. Now, there is something I would not have thought of – nor that dropping it would induce a new doc in Scriv. Nice.
