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Happy New Year!

If, like me, you've been using the Mangia! recipe management program on the Mac, you're used to it's quirks and annoyed that it runs under OS9. But since it's flat out still the best recipe program I've ever used overall, it's hard to give it up.

Even worse, it has no export capability at all and it's database format is shrouded in mystery. Which means that all of your collected recipes are locked into an increasingly outmoded program.

Well, I have a partial solution for you -- you won't like it much and it doesn't preserve everything from Mangia! (at least, not yet). But you won't have to type in hundreds of recipes from scratch in order to move them to something newer!

Here's the steps from the README:

1. Install Print2PICT and make sure you configure in the 'optional' modules. We're going to be using the 'Print to TEXT' output format. Select Print2PICT in the Chooser.
2. Print out your recipes:
   • Select 'Print to TEXT' as the 'Disposition'
   • Select 'Large Type Layout' as the 'Page Design'
3. Untar the mangia converter archive into some appropriate location
4. Make sure that your PATH variable points to the 'bin' directory. In 'csh', for example, try something like:
   set path=($path ~/mangia2import/bin)
5. Run the conversion script, selecting an appropriate output format (running the 'mangia' script by itself will print out the formats available in thisrelease). For example:
   mangia --format mastercook Mangia\ 1.2\342\200\242Recipes\342\200\242001 > mc.txt

There are several things you have to make sure of:

1. Don't indent the paragraphs in your directions.
2. Make sure every recipe has some directions, even if it's just 'Mix well.'

Using the '-v' option, the script will print out every recipe title it thinks it finds. By watching this list, you can usually find the recipes that violate the above two rules and edit them pretty easily to get the whole process to work again.

Download the archive and extract it somewhere (like your home directory).

(23:54) [/dev] mangia