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Other Bike Formats
Bike's two main file formats are Bike HTML (.bike) and Bike Markdown (.md). Both store your outline with full fidelity, and one of them is what I'd reach for day to day.
Beyond those, Bike speaks a handful of other formats for specific jobs: trading outlines with other apps, processing them with tools, or pasting text into another document. You can save some of them with File > Save As, and you can produce any of them on the fly with the Edit > Copy commands described at the end of this page.
OPML
OPML (.opml) is the lingua franca of outliners, a widely supported standard for moving outlines between apps. I reach for it when I need to get an outline from Bike into another OPML compatible app, or back the other way.
I think of OPML as an interchange format, not a full-fidelity one. Bike does tuck its own data into the file using extra attributes, but other OPML apps ignore those and see only plain text, so row types and rich formatting don't reliably survive a round trip through another app. My advice: use OPML to move an outline between apps, then save it back in .bike or .md once it's home.
HTML
Bike's native .bike format is already HTML. A .bike file is a valid HTML document. If you'd like that file to carry an .html extension instead (so other apps recognize it as HTML, or it opens in a browser by default), you can simply save it with .html. Bike still reads and writes it as full-fidelity Bike content; only the extension changes. See Bike HTML Format for the details of the format itself, and Using Documents for how custom extensions work.
JSON
Bike can also read and write your outline as JSON (.json). The JSON mirrors your outline's full structure (every row, its type and attributes, and the hierarchy), which makes it the easiest format to crunch with scripts and other tools. Reach for it when you want to process your outline programmatically rather than read it by hand.
Plain Text
Plain text (.txt) represents your outline as plain lines, using tab indentation to show the hierarchy. It's about as universal as a format gets, but it can't store any metadata: row types, row attributes, and text formatting are all dropped, and so are the row ids that row links depend on. Use it when you just want the words and the shape, and don't mind losing everything else.
Rich Text
Rich text keeps your formatting (bold, italic, and links), but not Bike's structure: row types, attributes, and ids are dropped. It's mainly handy for copying nicely formatted text out of Bike and pasting it into another app like Mail or a word processor.
Copying in Any Format
The quickest way to produce one of these formats is the Edit > Copy submenu. Each command copies your current selection (rows and their children) in a particular format, ready to paste elsewhere:
- Copy (Command-C): copy in Bike's native format
- Copy Markdown Text: copy as Bike Markdown
- Copy HTML Text: copy as Bike HTML
- Copy OPML Text: copy as OPML
- Copy JSON Text: copy as JSON
- Copy Rich Text: copy formatted text for pasting into other apps
- Copy Plain Text: copy just the text, with tab indentation
One more command in that submenu changes what gets copied rather than the format. A selection can include rows that aren't currently on screen: descendants hidden inside a collapsed row, or rows tucked away by a filter. Plain Copy includes those hidden rows; Copy Displayed copies only the rows you can actually see, skipping anything hidden by folding or filtering. It's handy for lifting just the visible shape of an outline, for example the headings you've folded down to.
The same submenu also has Copy Row Link, Copy View Link, Copy Document Link, and Copy Row Identifier for working with links. And going the other way, the Edit > Paste submenu offers Paste and Render Markdown, Paste and Render HTML, and Paste and Render OPML to bring formatted content in.