http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/surfulater/

Perhaps it is just I but I am dashed if I can export any of the web snippets to anything much less a Word file. What is the point of storing this retrieved data if I cannot export it into a wordprocessing document. I grant the snippets are lovely to look at but I actually need to use them in academic articles or legal briefs. I venture that I have been crimping longer than almost all----KAMAS on a Kaypro running CP/M----but I need to convert the outline with note/page into a Word document which one can do with the MS Word Outliner add-in which has been on siesta for almost a year if I remember correctly. UR has a magnificent web capture add-in but since I grabbed snippets from case law on Google Scholar and since for whatever reason UR could not export them, it was a no go for a legal reseach tool. Surfalator exports nothing to Word or PDF. Again it organizes the snippets attractively, but I need to do something productively with them and I cannot see how other than copying them into the MS Word Outliner.

Mitchell Kastner wrote:

Perhaps it is just I but I am dashed if I can export any of the web snippets to anything
much less a Word file. What is the point of storing this retrieved data if I cannot
export it into a wordprocessing document. I grant the snippets are lovely to look at
but I actually need to use them in academic articles or legal briefs. I venture that I
have been crimping longer than almost all----KAMAS on a Kaypro running CP/M----but I
need to convert the outline with note/page into a Word document which one can do with
the MS Word Outliner add-in which has been on siesta for almost a year if I remember
correctly. UR has a magnificent web capture add-in but since I grabbed snippets from
case law on Google Scholar and since for whatever reason UR could not export them, it
was a no go for a legal reseach tool. Surfalator exports nothing to Word or PDF. Again it
organizes the snippets attractively, but I need to do something productively with
them and I cannot see how other than copying them into the MS Word Outliner.

You could print them as PDFs (if you install a PDF printer driver). Or you could use a clipboard extender like ClipCache (or other free alternatives) to copy a bunch of stuff and then paste them into your preferred PIM/Word processor in one go (just like copying and pasting from actual websites).

According to the Help file the following export options are available:
- Publish entire Knowledge Bases or folders therein to view in a Web Browser, either locally or over the Internet.
- Save articles as either HTML or MHTML files, which can be opened in a Web Browser.
- E-mail Articles to friends and colleagues in HTML format.
- Copy and move Articles and Folders to other Knowledge Bases.
- Access content directly from Surfulater's XML Knowledge Base.

I'm quite happy with Surfulater as the main database for all my web clippings, but I have low expectations. I don't do much processing or annotation there (other than the occasional note or highlight), it's simply a place to keep stuff in and organise them into hierarchical themes. For any further analysis and processing I just copy and paste the relevant stuff into ConnectedText.

P.S. Perhaps I should add that I use Surfulater strictly for one type of data only: and that is web pages and web sites that relate to my empirical data. I don't use it for academic content. For academic articles and books, I save them as PDFs and link them to the downloaded bibliographic data in EndNote. This way I can separate theory (academic literature) from empirical data.

I use Surfulater for capturing the URLs, snippets of web page content, sometime the entire web page (if I want a permanent record of the look of the web page), sometimes screen shots. It is about keeping a record of the websites I visited that are related to my research, as their content is changing all the time and websites can disappear any minute without warning.

And what do you do with them after you have pasted them into CT? Does CT export to a wordprocessing program?

No to take issue with SZ, I would never do so, but I would welcome Goliath mounting the shoulders of David to perfect a one-stop tool to capture, store, organize, and then ulitmately to export content. I mean to say that serious thinkers analyze data and so far as I know, outlining is the best means to perform analysis. Yes I am addicted and happy to admit it but alas I very often need to get down to hard work and moving among four or five information processors strikes me as a trifle inefficient.

Mitchell Kastner wrote:

And what do you do with them after you have pasted them into CT? Does CT export to a
wordprocessing program?

CT doesn't export directly into a wordprocessing program (it can export as .txt, .html, .chm and .xml), although copy-and-paste into Word works fine for me.

It sounds like our research needs/processes are quite different. I don't really have a need for massive export from Surfulater. It is a database for my bookmarks and an archive for web clippings and some web pages saved in their entirety. Out of 1000s of links and clippings I will only ever need to transfer a handful of clippings (copy-and-paste) and some screenshots to serve as quotes and illustration for my main text that I develop in CT. As for MS Word, I only use that for the final cosmetic step of preparing the final report/paper for academic consumption (adding EndNote references), formatting text, and printing.

No to take issue with SZ, I would never do so, but I would
welcome Goliath mounting the shoulders of David to perfect a one-stop tool to
capture, store, organize, and then ulitmately to export content. (...) moving among four or five information processors strikes me
as a trifle inefficient.

I have given up on finding a super-tool like that. I have doubts whether there will ever be one (that will please me anyway :) I prefer to have a separate but perfect tool for each step and arrange them together myself, rather than having one tool that is great for 3 of the steps but poor with the other 2.

Having said all this, I'm quite satisfied with Surfulater as a basic tool for capturing web pages and their content and storing them in a hierarchical system. However its analytical capabilities are meagre. The full price ($79) seems quite a lot for what it does, and even 50% off is probably a bit expensive. On the other hand I've used it for years and never had any problems, so it's pretty reliable.

Mitchell Kastner wrote:

I would welcome Goliath mounting the shoulders of David to perfect a one-stop tool to
capture, store, organize, and then ulitmately to export content.

I think that there are different meanings to "exporting" content. Both ConnectedText and Surfulater provide very good HTML export, which effectively means a portable website of your organised content. In the case of Surfulater you also get a full tree to navigate through the content.

It also depends on the format of the content you want to capture. If it is in a large number of individual files of different types in various folders, a tool like UltraRecall might be more convenient. In this case, "export" would consist of re-creating the original folder/file structure.

Surfulater sale is on today:
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/surfulater/

I wish BDJ would get rid of the annoying animation of the "drop" in price ... the BDJ sometimes takes a while to load and I have to wait too long to see what the sale price is!