What is your favorite method of transferring text from an html page to a text document?

An easy question, I realize. But I have not found the perfect solution.

I have TextEdit, NeoOffice, and Appleworks, and the first two often have no trouble at all when it comes to copy/paste, except that TextEdit retains all formatting and when I want to switch to plain text then all formatting is lost. NeoOffice sometimes chokes on the document or retains too much of the tables formatting. Usually what I do is copy and paste but formatting can still be a problem if I want to print, etc. "Saving as web page" or "Saving as text" from Firefox will save the web page identically, depending on the site, but then at some point that web page will be deleted from the site and I can no longer access it—and I don't really want to print the whole web page that I have saved to my drive, only the text.

I would like to be able to transfer the text and manipulate it as I choose and print how I choose. So if I find a web page with text that I want to have permanently on my hard drive, what method do I use?

Tex-edit Plus used to be great at this.

Please clear up my simple-minded confusion.

Much obliged.

I use Text Edit in rich text mode to copy text from a web page. It allows formatting. That is, setting the font, font size, line spacing, margins, bold, italic, etc. It also allows deletions -- say of unwanted pics or text.

But you have Tiger. TE does all this in Leopard and beyond. I can't remember what TE does/doesn't do in Tiger.

I downloaded Tex-edit Plus 4.9.17 and it does a good job of cleaning up documents.

I also discovered the Firefox extension Print Edit.

It allows to remove various elements on a web page before printing it. For example, you can remove all the pictures with one click. You use the mouse to draw boxes around parts of the web page that you don't want. Takes a little bit of time, but it's very handy.

The last comment reminded me that the free application Evernote has a browser extension that allows extensive selection options for web pages. True, Evernote does a lot more, but for free and the ease with which it provides, it might be worth a look.