How to save a page as text or something other than web archive

Question

How to save a page as text or something other than web archive

I have to save a lot of pages of research from academic sources and then have to send them to other peers of mine and I would like to be able to just save the text of an article instead of having a webarchive. It's just easier, knowing that a .txt or rich-text or word file is pretty universal. I can't seem to figure out how to do this other than going to print then save as pdf... or dragging the text to the desktop to save as a clipping... is there any way I can just initially save straight to text? Thanks for the help in advance.

Powerbook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Apr 17, 2006 9:24 PM

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Answer 1

Yang

Level 6

9,125 points

Apr 18, 2006 12:20 AM in response to Spicybiscotti

Hi,

The laborious way would be to select all (cmd+a), copying (cmd+c), fire up TextEdit and from its 'Edit' menu, choose to paste and match style (opt shift+cmdv). Alternatively, if you have TextEdit set to format in plain text by default (so that it excludes graphics), you can make use of the 'services' submenu (under 'Safari') to create a 'New Window Containing Selection'.

Apart from that, the 'native from safari'-bit seems to point towards an applescript and/or automator-based solution. Have you tried playing around with that? For instance, in Automator, you could conceivably create a workflow which includes..

'Get Current Webpage from Safari' > 'Get Text from Webpage' > 'New TextEdit Document'

Yang

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Answer 2

Niel

Level 10

741,881 points

Apr 17, 2006 10:41 PM in response to Spicybiscotti

When saving a file, click on Web Archive and choose Page Source from the menu; this will produce an HTML document. You can then use TextEdit to convert the HTML file into another format, such as rich text or Word format if you want.

(11790)

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Answer 3

Apr 17, 2006 10:44 PM in response to Spicybiscotti

that works and thank you, but is there a way where i can just do it native from safari?

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Answer 4

Apr 18, 2006 6:29 AM in response to Spicybiscotti

Thanks, i kind of had a feeling that it would not be possible straight from safari... but those are some nice alternatives...

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