Export raw indented text (or Markdown-style bullet points)

L Nguyen Huu · August 8

I noticed that MindMeister can import indented raw text (not Markdown bullet points mind, the hyphens would stay in the final nodes), but not export indented raw text (nor Markdown bullet points).

Proposal

My proposal is to allow exporting a .txt file containing indented raw text, symmetrically to how it imports them.

Bonus point for adding import/export of Markdown (with bullet points using either hyphens of numbers).

Problem

Without this, it's very hard to interoperate with other tools, whether there are other Mindmap tools or just Markdown editors.

It's not even possible to cycle import and export of the same .txt file. You can export in .rtf but it is a much more complex format that is not human-readable (try to open an .rtf with a raw text or code editor like Notepad or VS Code and you'll see).

Why it's important to me

For instance, this is my writing workflow:

write story draft in bullet points / indented text (at this point I don't know if the story will be worth spending time on, so I don't use an online Mindmapper service)
import in MindMeister for visualization
edit story mindmap
export as bullet points / indented text ⇐ currently impossible
convert each line into a chapter / section header (using Markdown #)
write actual paragraphs directly under those headers

Generally speaking, I also expect symmetrical import and export when it comes to standard formats. I don't expect MindMeister to be able to export in a proprietary format used by another software though, so ultimately there should be more import formats than export formats, but I do expect it to export in simple formats, esp. as it already exports in RTF which is more complex.

Workarounds

I tried to export an .rtf and convert it to .txt using an app like LibreOffice. Unfortunately, it lost all the indents, because it seems that the .rtf doesn't contain "real" indents but rather left margins that are pushed farther and farther to simulate indent levels. Surprisingly, MindMeister is able to import these .rtf back by reading the left margin!

Similar issues

A question on Markdown text: https://community.meister.co/discussion/comment/6299

But the answer just says you can't. And it's not a proposal so I had to open one.