Printing out the entirety of a structure note?

nikpanaousis

Hello. My apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere. I am facing the following problem: I have a structure note on Financial Reporting, and I am trying to find an efficient way to display all the contents of the links of that structure note in a single document. I currently do that by manually opening notes and copy pasting their title and contents in the end of the file. I would really appreciate that if someone could point me to a less-manual way of doing that!

GeoEng51

@nikpanaousis said:
Hello. My apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere. I am facing the following problem: I have a structure note on Financial Reporting, and I am trying to find an efficient way to display all the contents of the links of that structure note in a single document. I currently do that by manually opening notes and copy pasting their title and contents in the end of the file. I would really appreciate that if someone could point me to a less-manual way of doing that!

Hmmm...I don't think there is a way of doing what you want to do from within The Archive. I have used other apps like NotePlan, 1Writer and Drafts to open my ZK files, but they don't have that capability either.

One app that could handle the task is Scrivener. I work in Scrivener a lot, and it would be a breeze to do what you describe, either to print or just to compile various text files into one larger document. However, one needs to get the various text files into Scrivener in the first place. That's not too difficult - you create an empty Scrivener project, then start dragging and dropping files into it. You would start with your structure note, then while reading down the structure note, select, drag and drop each referenced zettel (in order, if you want, although it doesn't matter as you can easily change the order of the zettels later). Once you have all the desired zettels in your Scrivener project, you can re-arrange, add text, etc., view all the zettels on a "flow-through" screen, print them all out, or compile them all into a document of your choice (Word, PDF, etc.).

This may sound a bit complicated, but it is not. I realize it's not as simple as having an app automatically step through all the links for you and dump everything into one long text or markdown file, but I think what I have described would be simpler and a lot less work than what you described. And you would have a lot of flexibility with the resulting project, as just described.

ctietze

@nikpanaousis The way with the least amount of fiddling would be to use file transclusion. That's a feature of some Markdown tools like Marked, which can export to PDF or print directly.

https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/447/request-file-transclusion-including-topic-notes-in-a-higher-note

To make this work, you would have to

1. move all [[202406101047]] links onto their own lines, and then
2. replace [[ with {{ and ]]with}}`
3. add the full file name, unfortunately

So from

This is a text[[20240610104835]] but I have many references![[20240610104832]]

to

This is a text:

{{20240610104835 the actual file.md}}

but I have many references!

{{20240610104832 another file.md}}

---

This is a bit tedious, of course. Looking at the Keyboard Maestro macro index, https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/macros/, @Will has macro to convert ID-only links to links with title/file name:
https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/2132/#Comment_2132

With a bit of scripting, this could be fully automated 🤔 I don't have the time today to try that, though.

Will

@nikpanaousis Printing is something I've looked at in the past. I have a Keyboard Maestro/Python program that will print The Archive notes onto various-sized cards. At one point, I was considering switching to analog, and this would be a way to preserve my past notes.

I spent a few minutes creating a Python application that will make a file out of all the notes with links in a target note. You could use it on a structure note or any note. It combines all the notes referred to in any target note in the blink of an eye.

Using it requires a fundamental understanding of Python. Before I unleash the dogs, I have a few questions.
1. You do have Keyboard Maestro installed, don't you?
2. Do you have a relatively current version of Python installed?
3. What is your link format and file naming convention? This program is written for notes with links in the form that contains 12 digits and matching 12 digits in the corresponding file name.

@ctietze points out another way this could be done: by making a note that contains the desired links and asking the pre-processor in Marked 2 to combine the notes. This method would be more tedious, but you could get more customizable output.

As @GeoEng51 suggests, Scrivener is masterful at combining fragments of text into a bigger document, though it's not suitable for zettelkasting.

Zettelkasting-Tools · woodenzen · GitHub

nikpanaousis

Thank you everyone for the thorough responses! I now have several viable ways to go about achieving my goal! @Will even though I am not versed in Python, I will take shot at this approach. Until I achieve that, I will follow what @ctietze suggested, using Marked 2.