Scrapbook as the ultimate piece of software?

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by Mirce
Nov 21, 2014 at 09:24 AM

Hello fellow CRIMPers. Long time lurker, first time to post. Regarding my background: tried a great number of applications which are called PIM / Outliner / Freeform Outliner, amongst others: MyBase,MyNotesKeeper, KeyNote (well this one started it all for me), ScribblePapers,RedNotebook,Evernote,UltraRecall MyInfo. MyInfo is the one I am stuck on now, although it is still not EXACTLY what I am looking for (limited web-capture ability, limited export options).

Since my times with KeyNote, I am working on something like a knowledge repository, a place to collect everything interesting that I find in electronic format, and a place to enter the extracted knowledge from the gathered information-sources. The extracted knowledge can be entered into any kind of the above outliners, but I also want to have the corresponding information-sources available, which are in the form of web-pages, pdf articles and pdf-books, pictures etc. This import of external files is where most of the problems have their shortcomings - if they use one file for their database, importing many external files will inflate the database and make it slow to open/modify/save (This is a big problem for MyInfo).

This is where Scrapbook comes into play.

I’ve been using the original Scrapbook (by Gomita) for quite some time. It faithful capture is still unsurpassed by many commercial alternatives. However, the problem is that the original Scrapbook sort of died away, it is only updated to catch up with the (idiotic in my opinion) update cycle of Firefox.

So I was thrilled to find out that a fork exists - Scrapbook X, which is very actively developed.

Here on outlinersoftware Scrapbook has only been mentioned as a web-archiver, however it can be used for many things besides this function, in fact, it can be called an outline / PIM:
- tree-outline for navigating
- ability to enter and format notes (however, formatting is done only via shortcuts)
- drag and drop a file to the Scrapbook tree view and it becomes an item
- if the imported file is a picture, it is shown in the main window
- if it is a pdf, and you have an internal pdf reader in Firefox, it is also show (you can highlight and edit the pdf in the browser windows, save the changes and they are updated in the imported file)
- if the file type is not supported, it behaves like a file that you download from the internet, i.e. you can open it the native program or save it to disk
- Tags: there is a rudimentary support for tagging in the form of comments, which can be separately searched
- Search: full text search, search only in comments, in title, use RegExp
- Edit captured web-content: highlight, remove unwanted elements, add inline annotations, call-out boxes etc.
- Ability to merge captured web-pages
- Ability to capture only a part of the web-page
- Export options: the whole Scrapbook database can be exported to a HTML website; if you install the add-on Print2PDF, you can make pdf of scrapbooked items; there is also a CHM export plug-in available.
- If you use a portable installation of Firefox / palemoon, you can have your entire database with you on an usb-stick. Or you can put the scrapbook database on dropbox, and have it automatically synced across your machines.

Anyone else using Scrapbook in this manner? What are your thoughts?

Posted by yosemite
Nov 22, 2014 at 08:59 AM

Wow, sounds interesting, thanks. I had no idea it had been forked; I used Scrapbook long ago but stopped when I ditched Firefox for Chrome.

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 22, 2014 at 09:42 AM

Ditto; I hadn’t heard of Scrapbook X. Very tempting, but I use DEVONthink to capture web pages now, and don’t really want to move away from Safari (Chrome has a big memory hit on MacBooks).

Back to topic list