Store web site as rich text

Text in webarchives cannot be highlighted and I can’t scribble in between (usually do this in red). So I’d like to store web sites as rich text.

The manual way is to create a new rich text file and separately bring over the text and URL from the browser via the clipboard. This only works for Safari, as Camino only puts plain text into the clipboard.

How to automate it?
Maybe a script “conver webarchive to text”?

Have you tried the Convert For Editing command? This will convert a Web archive to rich text and preserve the URL.

Another way is to select, in Safari or another Web Kit–based browser, the part of the page that you want (or even all of it) and drag it to EagleFiler. This will create a rich text file and preserve the URL.

Overlooked that. Thanks!

Ah yes. I just tried the capture button.

Capturing the URL
I’ve just registered EF so I may be misunderstanding something. But when I drag a selection from Safari to the EF icon on the dock it captures the rich text but sometimes only only PART of the URL up to the end of the domain name, for example. Or sometimes it captures none of the URL.

http://www.inquit.com/images/EF_URLCapture.jpg

Furthermore, the ‘capture text’ key (CMD+% in the standard services config) does not seem to capture the URL of a highlighted text in Safari.

And while I’m here… may I ask that you consider some other changes to the data in the ‘From’ field? When I ‘print’ a PDF from Safari to EF, for example, the ‘From’ field contains my username on this computer. It would be much more helpful if it contained the URL of the file printed (I use the Schubert_IT plugin… not sure if that is responsible for anonymizing the origin of the print job).

Thank you

The From field is intended to be a short, human-readable name. For a PDF or Word document, it’s the author; for a Web page it’s the name of the server. When you drag text from Safari into EagleFiler or press the capture key, EagleFiler stores the full source URL, but this is not displayed in the Info inspector. You can view the source URL as a tooltip in the records list or by using the Edit > Copy Source URL command.

Just to be clear here, Command-% is called the Import Text service. That it does not include the URL is a limitation of Mac OS X’s services feature. If you need the URL for a selection of text I suggest using drag and drop instead of the service.

Sorry, that’s not possible. When you print, OS X sets the username as the PDF’s author. This happens before it gets to EagleFiler.

How’d I miss that one. Sweet!

:slight_smile:

Still not capturing URLs

Hi Michael

I find that drag-and-drop (from Safari onto the EF icon on the dock) does not preserve the URL either. The ‘tool-tip’ shows the name of the file created by EF. This is a problem for me because I need to retain the origins of the material I gather for reference purposes.

Could you please confirm for me that I should be able to find the URL from dragged text somewhere where I can recover it for reference use?

DevonThink somehow manages to get around the limitation you mention of the ‘import text service’ in OS X. I know I can put an AppleScript into the service menu (Cakhia Tv | Cà Khịa Tv Xem Bóng Đá Trực Tiếp | Hd Mượt Mà Blv), but I haven’t figured out how to capture a selection and URL using Applescript yet.

Thanks for your support.

Ok… Solved it, I think
The reason the URL was not being preserved is that there is a DIFFERENCE between dragging the text/imagest to the dock icon and dragging them onto the ‘Drop Box’. The URL is preseved in the latter case, but not the former.

Curious … like the need to have the browser window open… I can live with it but I’d rather not have either the browser or the drop box on my desktop if I had the choice :wink:

Yes, when you drag to the Dock icon, the OS actually treats this as invoking the service, rather than as a normal drag and drop. So it has the same URL limitation as the service. I’ll see if I can find a way to get the URL from the service; I tried this before and it didn’t work, but based on what you’ve said there must be a way.

Well, you can close the Drop Pad. If you don’t want to see the browser window, perhaps you could minimize it to the Dock or option-click when switching out of EagleFiler so that it hides.

With EagleFiler 1.4, you can set it to directly import Web pages as rich text.

With EagleFiler 1.4.1, the URL is preserved when using the Import service from a Web view and when dragging text onto EagleFiler’s Dock icon.