I’ve recently been investigating the personal utility of OPML as a common format in some of the programs I use.
I discovered that it can work well and is especially useful for long complex documents. Having been experimenting in writing a book as a single .md file (principally using WriteMonkey) with headings h1-h6 section levels, I thought it might be interesting to test a conversion to OPML and import into Workflowy and Dynalist. I was a little surprised to find it displayed as a hierarchy of bullets with notes containing the text - just about perfect. Exporting such a bulleted list using OPML converted the bullets to headers again.
I used Typora to do the conversions both ways, purely because that’s what is simplest for me (its underlying engine is Pandoc).
I strongly suggest that any formatting written in Workflowy/Dynalist etc is done manually using markdown syntax - using their internal formatting does not transmit using OPML. Dynalist will display most text formatting correctly except italics (it has its own weird double underline syntax for italics); Workflowy won’t. No problem for those used to using the Obsidian editor without looking at the Preview.
Workflowy has the ability to colour text. This does transmit, but the syntax is wrong for markdown editors; easily fixed with a global replace. It also has a kanban view.
I do not suggest bulk writing in one of the outliners as they have none of the usual helpful features, though Dynalist now has wordcount, but for smaller tasks they may be helpful.
Many other programs that might form part of a common workflow use OPML - eg mindmappers, Scrivener - but I haven’t tested their limitations.
