The current version of Mangia!  does not support directly “importing” recipes from other recipe programs. However, you can get much the same effect by using the Macintosh Copy and Paste mechanism to move text from another application into the various parts of a recipe in Mangia! .

You begin with a plain text file containing your recipe(s). Perhaps the file has been Exported from other cooking software; perhaps you scanned the recipe and obtained the text with character-recognition software; perhaps you’ve just filed your recipes using a word processor or similar application. Regardless of the source, begin by opening the file that currently contains the recipe(s). If the file is plain text, you can use the creating application, or any word processor, or TeachText, or any of several Desk Accessories.

The basic procedure is to Copy text for each part of the recipe from the other application, then Paste it into the appropriate editor within Mangia! :
• Create a new recipe in a Mangia!  recipe file, titled appropriately.
• In the other application, select the text for one part of the recipe.
• Use Copy on the Edit menu.
• Switch back to Mangia!  and open the relevant part of the new recipe.
• Use Paste on the Edit menu to dump the text into Mangia! 

This technique pays off the most for large blocks of text, like the Instructions or Notes, and perhaps the Title of the recipe. Unless you are a very slow, inaccurate typist you’ll probably find it more efficient to simply type most of the other parts of a recipe. However, there is a special technique for the Ingredient List of a recipe that lets you avoid copying and pasting every part of every ingredient in the list.

Instead of each word or phrase, copy the whole ingredient list of the recipe as usual. But in Mangia! , with the Ingredient List editor active, don’t use the Edit menu to Paste (that would just dump the text into the nearest text box). Instead, use the Ingredients menu and select Paste Ingredient(s). This will tell Mangia!  to interpret the text you just Copied as an Ingredient list, and to add it to the ingredient list that’s now being edited.

This feature can save you a tremendous amount of time, but you should understand in advance that Mangia! will often need your help figuring out one or more of the ingredients you pasted. Food writers have a way of making it very difficult for a computer to understand what they mean, and if Mangia!  ever gets lost, you will get a dialog asking you to interpret a line of text as an ingredient. This won’t take any more time than entering the ingredient directly, though, so every ingredient that Mangia!  can do on its own puts you ahead of the game.

Mangia!  has a very specific idea of what an ingredient list looks like, so you can help in advance by editing your text a little. First, every ingredient must begin and end on one line: no multi-line ingredients. Second, Mangia!  assumes that an ingredient consists of several elements (most of them optional) in a specific order:
• an Amount (which may be missing), followed by 
• Prep for Measuring (which may also be missing), followed by
• at least one Ingredient (if more than one, they should be separated by ‘,’, ‘and’ or ‘or’), then
• Remarks and Other Prep, consisting of everything following the Ingredient(s).

For example, “1 cup chopped onions, sauteed until translucent” is a perfectly well-formed ingredient.

You can put a Tab in between the parts above as a hint.

To set out groups of ingredients, you still put one on a line, but add special lines that tell Mangia!  how to group them. If you want to specify a Choice group of ingredients, separate their lines with a line consisting of the word ‘or’:

1 tablespoon butter
OR
1 tablespoon margarine

For more than two in a group, you can use commas:

1 tablespoon butter
,
1 tablespoon margarine
OR 
1 tablespoon corn oil

You can also form large groups without bothering with the commas simply by bracketing the appropriate lines with parentheses. The last example could also look like:

( OR
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon margarine
1 tablespoon corn oil
)

Here’s how to form a large Named group:

( Bechamel Sauce
1 tablespoon flour
1 tablespoon butter
OR 
1 tablespoon margarine
1 cup milk
) 

This “Bechamel Sauce” group has three ingredients, one of which (butter or margarine) is a Choice group. It also shows that you can have groups within groups.

You can use ‘[‘, ‘]’, ‘‘ and ‘‘ instead of parentheses if you like, and ‘and’ and ‘or’ can be upper or lower case.