boxnotes2html
=============

boxnotes2html is a tool to convert Box Notes to html, markdown or plain text

NOTE: Due to changes in the Box Note format, this only works with Box Notes
created before August 2022. See this
issue: 
https://github.com/alexwennerberg/boxnotes2html/issues/3

Rationale
---------

Box Notes are a proprietary, undocumented format, which makes them difficult to
export or move to another service. According to this [support
ticket](https://community.box.com/t5/Desktop-and-Mobile-Forum/Exporting-Box-Notes/td-p/14834)
the official way in which they meet GDPR compliance is through allowing users
to print the notes page as a PDF when it's open in a web browser.  Another
option is to Copy/paste the document into LibreOffice, Google Docs, Microsoft
Word or some other text-editing program. Neither of these are very attractive
options when exporting a large number of Box Notes, say, for archival/backup
purposes or in the process of migrating to another platform.

Installation
------------

No external dependencies required! Just the good old Python standard library.

Use `pip install boxnotes2html` to install.

To install from source:

    git clone https://github.com/alexwennerberg/boxnotes2html
    pip install .

Requires Python 3. Tested on >=3.5

Usage
------

boxnotes2html -h for help and options.

To convert a file:

boxnotes2html mynote.boxnote

Will create a file called mynote. You can optionally specify the filetype with
`-f`, current options, in order to most to least reliable, html, md (markdown),
and txt (plaintext)

You can specify one or more options. If any of the options are a directory,
boxnotes2html will convert those notes and put the new file next to it in the
directory path.

Box doesn't allow for you to download individual Box notes from the UI, but you
can put them into a folder and download that folder, or use the API.

You can also use boxnotes2html as an imported library:

    python
    from boxnotes2html import BoxNote
    note = BoxNote("boxnote_file_content_string")
    note = BoxNote.from_file("filename.boxnote")
    note.as_html() # returns an html string
    note.as_markdown() # returns a markdown string
    note.as_text() # returns raw text

The HTML formatted by this tool is pretty ugly -- that may not be important for
a lot of cases, but you may want to use [tidy](http://www.html-tidy.org/) or
another tool to clean it up. You can also use [pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) to
convert from html to another format, such as PDFs, markdown, microsoft word,
and so on. I haven't tested all these tools, so I can't vouch for their
effectiveness.


Functioning:
* Text formatting (bold, underline, colors, size, etc)
* Hyperlinks
* Ordered, unordered, checked and unchecked lists are supported in Markdown (using Github flavoured check/uncheck syntax).
* Tables in Markdown

Caveats:
* HTML lists don't supported nesting
* HTML tables are broken however it should be possible to take the approach used for Markdown and apply it - PRs welcome.
* Images are just a link to the image in Box, converting them would require API access.
* Comments and annotations are not saved.
* Document history is not preserved
* This tool is in ALPHA, bugs may exist. Please report any issues you encounter!
* Links to other Box notes are not changed in any way

## Feedback

Feel free to open an issue or email me with any questions or feedback:
alex@alexwennerberg.com If you use this library, I would love to know what your
experience is, positive or negative. I do maintain this, so feel free to make
feature requests or bug reports. Thanks, and enjoy!