Surfulater Helps Overcome Pasting Problems

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Posted by Daly de Gagne
Jan 7, 2007 at 12:10 AM

I have often been frustrated by info programs that do not allow an accurate pasting of web pages. Given that so much info comes from the web, this problem can’t be overstated.

I have found that often when I paste into MDE InfoHandler, ADM, MyInfo or, to a lesser extent, the beta version of WhizFolders Vers 6 Deluxe Edition that spacing between paragraphs is either eliminated or exagerated, that web page design elements remain, and that bold or italics may be removed. The extent of the problem seems to vary from web site to web site.

Today I discovered, using articles from Outlook India and from Z Magazine that by first selecting the articles and taking it into Surfulater, which 99.9 percent of the time faithfully renders the web material it captures, I could overcome the problem.

When I first selected/copied the articles directly from the web pages in question and pasted them into IH and WF, IH removed the bold face print and, in the case of the Outlook India article removed all spaces between paragraphs, and in the case of the Z Magazine article increased the space between paragraphs and removed the bold face. WF kept the correct spacing but removed the bold face.

Once the sample articles were in Surfulater, I did a select all/copy, and then pasted them into InfoHandler and WhizFolders.

In each program the article was accurately pasted, with proper spacing between paragraphs and bold face in tact.

I am going to experiment further.

But given the time I have wasted pasted and re-formatting articles, I think it probably pays to make this a two-step process, ie. first capturing web material as an article in Surfulater, then copying and pasting to the destination info program.

I like WhizFolders (since Ariadne isn’t being developed actively again I am thinking of using WF for writing because of the ease of having multiple windows) and InfoHandler (for news and journal articles) very much. However, the pasting issue is an annoyance that seems to plague every info management/outline program I have tried with the exception of dedicated web clippers such as Surfulater.

(I have a lot of material also in Zoot, but didn’t use it for this experiment.)

Daly

Posted by Tom S.
Jan 7, 2007 at 12:05 PM

Daly de Gagne wrote:
>I have often been frustrated by info programs that do not allow an accurate pasting of
>web pages. Given that so much info comes from the web, this problem can’t be
>overstated.

I have found that OneNote does a pretty good job with this. It definitely preserves the text formating you are talking about. There’s a “Send to OneNote” component that integrates with the browser and does a pretty goo djob.

Deficiencies include the lack of support for frames and the ever present problem of eliminating spaces between paragraphs. If these are important, you can print to OneNote using a printer driver that comes with the program. This fathfully renders any document, including a webpage, and inserts it into OneNote as a searchable image.

Tom S.

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