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Saving postings in toto.
#6714 12/14/09 09:15 PM
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joyss Offline OP
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I have received a whole page of help from a question I asked. I would like to preserve them as one page of info, but selecting all, copy and then paste to a word processor has a complicated mess that I cannot edit. Any ideas? (*_*)


(*_*)
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Re: Saving postings in toto.
joyss #6718 12/15/09 02:56 AM
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Have a go with the free utility Paparazzi! You can use it to capture pages as PDF or as a PNG image.

I just tried with a long thread in this forum. For some reason, the content doesn't appear when you open it in Adobe Reader, although if you try to select it, stuff DOES seem to get highlighted. This could easily be a settings problem on my end (or maybe I need to update something), so don't necessarily believe that it won't work for you.

However, when I opened it in the free PDF reader Skim (an excellent, lightweight PDF reader, by the way)it shows up fine, and I can select, copy and paste the text into BBEdit.


We write what we are.
Re: Saving postings in toto.
joyss #6721 12/15/09 10:51 AM
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Very strange. What WP are you using?
I've selected all, cut and pasted into Word (both doc and rtf), and editing works neatly as always.

Re: Saving postings in toto.
joyss #6722 12/15/09 12:25 PM
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I just did a similar test as grelber and was able to copy and paste into both Word and Pages.

My result for Word was slightly different in that I could not get a satisfactory result with RTF. The two good pastes were Unformatted Text and Styled Text found under Paste Special. My version of Word is Office 2004 and my OS is 10.6.2

If I just pasted in Word I got an unusable result.

In Pages a simple paste gave me everything including avatars but a Paste and Match Style provided all the text quite satisfactorily.

ryck


ryck

"What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits" The Doobie Brothers

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Re: Saving postings in toto.
joyss #6727 12/15/09 06:45 PM
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Use the Safari browser to view the page, then choose to print the page. In the Print dialog box, use the option to save the page as a pdf file.

Safari creates pdf files with working URLs, unlike some browsers. Check the saved pdf file with Preview, because once in a while, something is missing when a pdf is created from content viewed with Safari.


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Re: Saving postings in toto.
ryck #6729 12/15/09 07:12 PM
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And y'all wonder why I like/prefer OS 9 and Word 98.
They work as slick as hot buttered corn. wink


That must be wonderful; I have no idea what it means.
— Molière
Re: Saving postings in toto.
grelber #6730 12/15/09 07:43 PM
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Originally Posted By: grelber
And y'all wonder why I like/prefer OS 9 and Word 98.
They work as slick as hot buttered corn. wink

And which OS9 browser pray tell renders today's websites satisfactorily?

Re: Saving postings in toto.
Hal Itosis #6735 12/15/09 10:10 PM
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Mozilla — at least all the websites I care about and/or require. grin


That must be wonderful; I have no idea what it means.
— Molière
Re: Saving postings in toto.
MicroMatTech3 #6746 12/16/09 09:24 AM
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Right on, MMT3; I've tried 3rd party apps and found Apple's built-in functionality to be more than sufficient in this instance.


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Saving postings in toto.
grelber #6747 12/16/09 09:25 AM
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joyss might have been trying to do it with TextEdit; try it and see what you get.

Edit: It not only doesn't work for me in Bean (word processor, not text editor), either, but I wound up with your cat waving its tail across my own avatar.

Last edited by artie505; 12/16/09 09:31 AM.

The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Saving postings in toto.
artie505 #6748 12/16/09 10:13 AM
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What's TextEdit? Nothing of that name pops up in either my browser (Mozilla) or in Word.

Re: Saving postings in toto.
grelber #6749 12/16/09 10:44 AM
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Originally Posted By: grelber
What's TextEdit? Nothing of that name pops up in either my browser (Mozilla) or in Word.

/Applications


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Saving postings in toto.
grelber #6755 12/16/09 12:34 PM
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TextEdit is the OS X heir to SimpleText—the text editor that ships with the operating system.



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Re: Saving postings in toto.
MicroMatTech3 #6756 12/16/09 01:05 PM
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An alternative is to use iCab, which offers a PDF choice in its File menu -> Save As... dialog's File Format pop-up menu. iCab's rendition of web pages in its creation of PDFs seems generally superior to those of other browsers using the Print... -> Save As PDF... technique, as discussed in maybe we should have a "browser" thread.

Like Safari, iCab produces PDFs with clickable URLs, but the unwary should be forewarned that clicking a working URL will always open the link target in the default browser—not necessarily the browser which produced the PDF.

Perhaps once joyss returns to the thread and lets us know more about the planned use of the archived material, we'll be in a better position to provide additional pertinent advice; if the goal is to reduce the information to fully editable text only, for instance, a different approach might be indicated than if the goal is to simulate the browsing experience while offline.



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Re: Saving postings in toto.
dkmarsh #6759 12/16/09 01:36 PM
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Ah so ...
If I cut and paste into a SimpleText page, I'd have to do a lot more editing qua deletion to achieve the result that I get a lot quicker by inserting it into a Word page.
But otherwise it's pretty straightforward (read: manifestly clear).
Once again, kudos to OS 9.

Re: Saving postings in toto.
grelber #6765 12/16/09 05:17 PM
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I tried two pastes into TextEdit. With 'Paste and Match Style' I got all the text in editable form, as I did with the same type of paste into Pages, or into Word using one of the selections under 'Paste Special'.

A simple paste into textEdit was quite different. That gave me the entire page as laid out in FTM, including avatars, with the animation in yours still working. I then saved that file to the desktop, signed out of FTM, and closed Safari. When I opened the TextEdit file I had saved, it opened exactly as previously.....including the working animation.

Nifty.

ryck

Last edited by ryck; 12/16/09 05:20 PM. Reason: Added info

ryck

"What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits" The Doobie Brothers

iMac (Retina 5K, 27", 2020), 3.8 GHz 8 Core Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, 2667 MHz DDR4
OS Ventura 13.6.3
Canon Pixma TR 8520 Printer
Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner c/w VueScan software
TM on 1TB LaCie USB-C
Re: Saving postings in toto.
ryck #6766 12/16/09 05:24 PM
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Sounds like your TextEdit prefs are configured to open new documents as Rich text documents.

If they're configured to open new documents as Plain text, as mine are, then a simple paste gives the same result as "Paste and Match Style."



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Re: Saving postings in toto.
dkmarsh #6771 12/16/09 10:50 PM
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dkmarsh,

Thanks for pointing out iCab’s ability to save in pdf format. I will probably continue to use the .zip archive for postings here, but it is good to know that iCab produces functioning links.

There is of course a disk space penalty for the pdf format. This page (before this posting) was 74 KB in iCab’s zip format, and 209 KB as a pdf.


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Re: Saving postings in toto.
dkmarsh #6774 12/17/09 12:51 AM
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Originally Posted By: dkmarsh
Sounds like your TextEdit prefs are configured to open new documents as Rich text documents.


You're right. I guess that's the default as I've never goofed with them. Nifty, nonetheless.

ryck


ryck

"What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits" The Doobie Brothers

iMac (Retina 5K, 27", 2020), 3.8 GHz 8 Core Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, 2667 MHz DDR4
OS Ventura 13.6.3
Canon Pixma TR 8520 Printer
Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner c/w VueScan software
TM on 1TB LaCie USB-C
Re: Saving postings in toto.
grelber #6783 12/17/09 05:02 AM
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Originally Posted By: grelber
Ah so ... If I cut and paste into a SimpleText page, I'd have to do a lot more editing qua deletion to achieve the result that I get a lot quicker by inserting it into a Word page. But otherwise it's pretty straightforward (read: manifestly clear). Once again, kudos to OS 9.

I must point out that Word (and/or Office 98) is not "OS 9". Perhaps if you had said AppleWorks (or ClarisWorks), then there might be some "OS 9" kudos to crow about.

If you have ever used Apple's 'WorldText' (the second upgrade in the TeachText --> SimpleText series), then you might have some vague idea of what TextEdit in OSX is like. TextEdit is actually a really (really!) decent default 'vanilla' text editor. It is light years beyond SimpleText. It can open and save html, rtf, rtfd (rtf with images), odt, doc, docx, and xml... not to mention txt and Safari's own "webarchive" format (which admittedly is not quite as reliable as Microsoft's ancient waf).

I realize you need to continually rationalize your choice to stick with OS9, but it flies in the face of reality (Text Services, Quartz, and a zillion other OSX technologies) to even think that OS9 is something worth comparing to OSX. There is no "there" there.

And as far as word processors not included in the OS goes, i'll take Pages over Word any day.

--

As to the original topic (re: saving web pages into a document that we can edit):

Yes, i use TextEdit and save either as rtf or rtfd (when the page has images i want to keep). It works beautifully for me. The only "challenge" there is: how much *junk* from the web page do we want to save. Some are loaded with silly 1-pixel invisible gifs (usually named blank.gif, clear.gif, pixel.gif, spacer.gif, or speck.gif) which -- despite being so small as to be invisible -- will still consume a 4K swath of disk space each. So, just pop open the rtfd package in Finder and direct those useless items to the trash.

If anyone is curious how many of those useless gifs they have in their home, this command will list them:

find -xE ~ -iregex '.*\.rtfd/.*(blank|clear|pixel|s(pacer|peck))\.gif'

[just try that in OS9.] Naturally, that command could be tweaked to erase those files as well.

Last edited by Hal Itosis; 12/17/09 06:29 AM. Reason: replaced (embarrassingly) complicated bracket expressions with -iregex for case-insensitive search
Re: Saving postings in toto.
ryck #6784 12/17/09 07:23 AM
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> "Paste and Match Style"

Thanks for mentioning that; I never knew it existed. (So much for following my own advice to others to cruise their menu bars.)


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Saving postings in toto.
Hal Itosis #6785 12/17/09 09:29 AM
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Yes, Hal, I understand your position. But my requirements are quite simple, and what I've got and use suits my requirements just right. I always operate on the principle that if it ain't broke, don't fix it — or, in this case, if there's no essential need, don't upgrade.
Thus, for example, I never use text editors per se, because I don't need to. Everything I process I can do with cut and paste, such as converting a newspaper article to an RTF document for saving. That works just fine for me.
I don't spend any time at all on YouTube and similar sites, process digital images or videos, create massive PowerPoint presentations, etc — that's why after 10 years I'm still only using 3 GB of my 14GB hard drive (with 1 GB of MP3 music) — so I have no need for speed (ie, broadband). The few times I might want to be entertained by such things, I have access to more updated Macs. That's how I know I don't like the latest incarnation of Word or most of OS X. Even if I were impressed with the latter, I'm satisfied with what I've got; I prefer putting my time to better use than trying to futz around with things I can't manipulate to my advantage in straightforward fashion, ie without significant and time-consuming and mind-numbing frustration.
But enough of my mini-rant. On with the show ...


That must be wonderful; I have no idea what it means.
— Molière

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