Management and editing of text files?

English
#1

i have a lot of simple txt files to sort through, gathering excerpts. the workflow i’d like to achieve is to import a library of txt files, maybe in the hundreds, and preview the content of each. while previewing, i’d like to be able to select a portion(s) of the text and copy it to a new document i’d be assembling within the app, adding text from the various preview files as i go.

it would be important to me to be able to maintain reference to the original preview document as i assemble. i’d like to be able to highlight text in the assemblage document and have the preview automatically display the preview it came from.

can i do something like this with libreoffice?

i think the closest analogy to this workflow would be what is called a ‘paper edit’ in the documentary video world, in which paper transcripts were physically cut up and pinned to a wall to build a narrative flow. the difference here is that, while a piece of paper maintains no inherent link to the document it came from, i’m hoping that libreoffice might have a way of keeping that link so that i could trace back from a piece of text to the place in a specific document that it came from.

thanks

#2

LibreOffice is an Office Suite in other words equivalents to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. No file management built in.

#3

Your source files are .txt. Don’t use Writer. It will insist on converting to formatted documents (at least internally). This is not your goal.

However if your project is some tool to build and resequence a “scenario”, Writer could be of some help after a preparatory phase, failing dedicated application.

Here is a suggestion but rework it:

  • paste a TXT file into Writer; style if Body Text
  • prefix it with a title or summary description (a single paragraph); style it Heading 1
  • below it, add the name of the source file; style it Heading 2

Repeat for all your files.

The Navigator side pane now shows the outline of this document under Headings. You can reorder the “blocks” by dragging the level-1 titles.

#4

You may find DDE links useful (copy a part of text from a saved file in Writer; in another document, use Paste Special); but they won’t work in TXT, and need ODT files (and as soon as you created a DDE link from a file, you need to save that source file, since the creation of a DDE link modifies the source, adding some internal bookmarks into it).

#5

i think i have a solution for now.

i found a command line way to convert tsv files, one of the formats that my transcription software spits out, into ods files for calc. there are only three columns in these files as they are very simple, a start time, an end time, and the spoken content. if i add a fourth column that contains the tsv filename in every cell in the column, at least for as long as the other columns have content, it will allow me to copy and paste rows into a new document and retain the info as to what tsv file the content originated in.

this is the command line that converts my tsv files to ods:
soffice --infilter=“Text - txt - csv (StarCalc):9,39,76,1,0/9” --convert-to ods *.tsv

i have some additional issues but that’s another subject i’ll try to solve separately.

thanks
babag

Calc on linux - populate a column with the document title from the command line
#6

@babag: your last post is about Calc. Why did you tag writer which pointed us in the wrong direction?

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