What am I doing wrong when importing RTF?

Shanty

Hey y'all

I just bought the Pro Version of MindMeister to use it to create awesome Quests for a game im working on with friends.

The Problem is, that i wanted to import our already exisiting quests into Mindmeister to work on them further.

The formatting fits the format shown in the faq article:

But, when i import it into mindmeister it looks like this:

Hope there is a solution to this, thanks for any help! 😊

Joerg Koper

Hi @Shanty and welcome to the community 👋🙂

You may try to create the quests in a text editor like shown below and copy it:

Then you go to MindMeister, create a new MindMap, delete all nodes that you don't need and change the view to outline. Then, without clicking anywhere, you insert the copied text and here we go:

Now it looks like that:

And you can make any desired changes and settings 😉

I hope, that's what you've been looking for.

Best, Jörg

Shanty

https://community.meister.co/discussion/comment/2947#Comment_2947

Thanks for you answer!

It does work this way, but if I were to do this with my already existing Documents, I would be doing this for the next week straight :(

When I simply save them as .txt, they loose all formatting and mindmeister takes every line for a new "bubble"...

Joerg Koper

Hi @Shanty,

I understand what you mean. I'm afraid the main problem is the (for MindMeister's algorithm) wrong formatting in your editor (word or something like that?) that is giving MindMeister the information to create the nodes like it does, like shown in your pic:

Is there a chance to change the documents with a script? Or you may take a look at ChatGPT. @Andrew Lapidus has written a really cool post about using MindMeister with ChatGPT and I have explained, how to use ChatGPT for formatting text for MeisterTask.

Maybe copy the text of the documents, insert it into ChatGPT and give it the order to output the text in a code window in the desired formatting. If you like to try it out, make sure that you create a shortcut for inserting the order...or save it in a text file for copy and paste.

This workaround may take less than weeks 😉

Best, Jörg

Andrew Lapidus

Hi @Shanty - thanks for reaching out and thanks for the tag @Jörg Koper! Sounds like a pretty awesome use case for MindMeister! 💪

I think @Jörg Koper is correct about the formatting issue here — seems like header/sub-header hierarchy in Word is unfortunately not exported properly into an RTF/Text file. As pointed out MindMeister understands importing RTFs by their indentation (TAB) structure, each level shows a different hierarchy. So the following RTF is imported easily:

But because of the lack of indentations in this example, it understands that each topic is on the same hierarchy level:

Hm... definitely not ideal. I get that the copy/paste solution would be extremely time intensive for a ton of maps! Let me see if I can find a way to do this by exporting the Word file to html and converting it there... Be back soon with results.

Joerg Koper

https://community.meister.co/discussion/comment/2953#Comment_2953

Awesome explanation Andrew 😊

Thanks for joining in.

Andrew Lapidus

Gah, unfortunately couldn't get the HTML conversion and reformatting to work in a meaningful way - I'll ask around to see if anyone has experience converting large numbers of Word files into mind maps. This seems to be a pretty natural use case! Maybe @Line Møller Jensen has some experience here?