Suggestions to replace Net Snippets?

Posted by Derek Cornish
Aug 11, 2007 at 03:34 PM

Barcelona,

One other thing. Make sure that whatever you use can search doc and pdf files as well as ordinary htm web pages and text files. Almost any web-capturing software can capture and search htm and text files; it’s a no-brainer. But most of us want more than that.

Few if any of the programs of the type you are looking for can do full-text searches with highlighted results of either MS doc files or pdf files from within their interface. Usually they skate over this problem. As always, there are workarounds, like exporting all the data and using a desktop search program to do the job - but as the cost of considerable inconvenience.

Web Research has some workarounds, using pdftotext, or allowing access to its database by the Windows Desktop Search. I don’t know what other similar programs are doing, but if they can’t handle indexing and searching of pdf files then IMO they are no use for serious research.

What’s the use of being able to capture and store pdfs if they can’t be indexed and searched by the program? At least NetSnippets and Scrapbook store their files in their native formats in the Windows filing system. That way any DTS program can index and search them.

Maybe Ultrarecall or MyBase handle pdf files better. If so they could provide other options.

Good luck, and let us know what you decide to use.

Derek