6.8. Tab-delimited Text

InqScribe can import and export tab-delimited text files. This is a convenient format for bringing transcript data into Excel or some other spreadsheet-like application.

You can find general guidance for importing and exporting data elsewhere.

6.8.1 Importing Tab-delimited Text

You can import a series of records in tab-delimited format. Tab-delimited format means that each line of the file corresponds to a single record, and fields within a record are separated by tab characters (e.g. ASCII 9).

Note: Records can be separated by any common end of line character. You can use CR (Macintosh default), CR/LF (Windows), or LF (Unix); InqScribe will handle them all just fine.

A record is a combination of a timecode and related text that is associated with that timecode. This is useful if you maintain a database of such records in another application.

InqScribe expects the tab-delimited data to have from two to four fields:

• Start time code. If this field is blank, InqScribe will ignore it.
• End time code. Optional. If this field is blank, InqScribe will ignore it.
• Speaker name. Optional, but if present, end time code must be present too. If this field is blank, InqScribe will ignore it.
• Related text. This field cannot contain end of line characters, since those are used to separate records. If your related text contains multiple lines, use a vertical tab character (ASCII 11) to separate the lines. (When InqScribe exports data records, it uses vertical tabs in this way, as does FileMaker Pro.)

Given the various optional fields, this means your tab-delimited file should match one of the following field orderings.

• Start time, related text
• Start time, end time, related text
• Start time, end time, speaker name, related text

Here's a brief example. If your import file looks like this (note that "\t" refers to a single tab character, e.g. ASCII 9):

00:00:00\tThe first line.
00:05:00\tThe second line.

Then your transcript will look like:

[00:00:00.00] The first line.

[00:05:00.00] The second line.

6.8.2 Exporting Tab-delimited Text

Exporting tab-delimited text creates a series of "records" as described on the exporting overview page. Each record consists of a start time field and a related text field; optionally, you may also export end time and speaker fields.

Fields are separated by tab characters; records are separated by end of line characters appropriate to your OS.

If there are return characters within a text field, they are converted to vertical tab characters (ASCII 11). Tabs within a field are converted to spaces.