Hi Eileen and Others, Paprika uses the file extension type to recognize the importing format. You need to use text files and name them with a ".yml" extension for YAML format before you import. Keywords like "name" and "servings" are followed by a colon and a space, then the text argument. For blocks of text, such as a list of ingredients, directions, or notes, use a colon, space, and then a vertical line character (Shift-Backslash or "|", where the backslash is the rightmost key below "delete" and above "return" on an English language input keyboard). Then, the subsequent lines of text until the next line with a keyword will all be part of the text block associated with that keyword. For the recipe categories keyword argument(s), enclose your categories between left and right square brackets. You can have multiple categories listed, like: categories: [Main Courses, Meat, Thanksgiving] You don't have to use all the available keywords for recipes, and the order you list them also doesn't matter, as long as they follow the name. You could probably just have a "name" keyword, and then everything else (ingredients, directions, etc.) under a text block for "notes" and import your recipes. Of course, your recipes would all be uncategorized, and the ingredients and directions wouldn't be separated or appear under the sections for ingredients and directions, but this would be a valid import format.
If you plan to import multiple recipes at once within a single file, then the "name" keyword has to be preceded by a hyphen and a space, so the import process can determine where new recipes start. If you only import a single recipe at a time, it doesn't matter whether you precede the name with a hyphen and a space or not. The easiest way to check this out is to try importing a single text recipe, and then examine the result and determine whether there are changes you want to apply before you import all your recipes. I personally don't like importing these file by file, nor do I find the ".yml" extension a natural one to use. So the way I handled the import was to start with my recipes as plain text files with the specified format. Then I used the Terminal command line to put all the recipe TXT files in a given folder into a single ".yml" file that I imported. Linux users will recognize the "cat" command to concatenate (put together) multiple files into a single file. I perform this in Terminal in the directory that holds a group of my recipe files in TXT format. This is just one way to combine files into a single file that I name "recipes1.yml"; you don't have to do it this way: cat *.txt > recipes1.yml I'll paste in a sample recipe for an example. (Hope the formatting works, because I'm not at my computer, so I'm copying the text from the Mail Archive post I sent to the Mac-Access list a year ago as part of a reply to a question about Paprika vs. MacGourmet, which is a very nice desktop Mac package, but doesn't have the same easy sync and integration with iOS devices. Also, I never found a way to bulk import your own recipes the way you can in Paprika in MacGourmet or any other major recipe manager software -- and I don't mean that you can't copy and paste in recipes one by one in these apps. Certainly you can do that and spend time reformatting each recipe by hand in any of these software applications. You can also batch import your own recipes directly into the iOS version of the app, using the file structure keywords I've described in this post. But every experiment trial you made would involve connecting up your iOS device to your computer, using iTunes file sharing to transfer over the ".yml" files and then using the import function to check whether you'd gotten things right and the way you want. This just seemed too painful to do at the same time I was trying to learn about the YAML file format. There is a brief description of this format in the section of the Paprika Recipe Manager User Guide on importing recipes. Here's an example of a text recipe I successfully imported into Paprika, in a file that I named "recipe.yml". It was an old plain text file that I had from a scan and OCR, and I just added the keyword syntax for fields like name, servings, ingredients, directions, etc. You don't need to have a leading hyphen and space before the name if you're only importing one recipe in the file. In general, key words end with a colon and a space, and text blocks (for ingredients and directions) have a vertical line after the colon and space. VO's reading sounds a bit better if you have complete sentences on each line, but I didn't change the sentence breaks from the way this came out from the scan and OCR when I imported. Incidentally, if I try to import a file with multiple recipes and there's a problem with one of the entries, it will simply fail to import the group. I don't have to worry about partial imports. - name: Latin Black Bean Soup servings: 5-6 prep_time: 20 min cook_time: 40 min on_favorites: yes categories: [Soup] ingredients: | ¼ cup olive oil 1 large onion, chopped 4 large cloves garlic, minced 1 large green pepper, cored, seeded, finely chopped 1 teaspoon each, leaf oregano, ground cumin 2 cups precooked black beans and broth 6-ounce can tomato paste 3 tbsp red wine vinegar 1 to 2 teaspoons salt 2 cups cooked brown rice Sour cream, sliced radishes, minced hot chilies, chopped cilantro directions: | Heat oil in a frying pan and sauté onion, garlic and green pepper together with seasonings. When vegetables are softened, add them to the black beans that have cooked for at least 1 hour. Add tomato paste, vinegar and salt and simmer, covered, for at least ½ hour. Add rice and serve in bowls garnished with sour cream, radishes, chilies (to taste) and cilantro. HTH. Cheers, Esther -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
