2018-07-12 00:05:51

I know there is a huge topic about web browsers kicking around at the moment, but I thought as I had a specific question it would be better in its own topic than interupting the flow of that discussion.

I've just today started watching Buffy season 5. As I've been watching the series, I've also been downloading the scripts as text files to read later.

In Ie I'd just do this by opening the page with the transcript, going to file and "save as" then changing the type to text files txt.

In Chrome I could save the page, but not as a text file for some reason.
Since these are transcripts they literally have no links, so saving them as  html doesn't make too much sense, and I believe if I save the pages as html and then convert to txt, I'll wind up with loads of excess code all over my transcript.

For the time being I've been just going back to Ie to save the transcripts, but it seems really odd there isn't a way of doing this in chrome/

Oh, and yes I know I could just C&p the entire page, but this seems fairly extreme overkill, and also risks mistakes.

So does anyone have any thoughts on this?

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-07-12 02:40:25

Hi Dark,

I know how to make this in Firefox, not in Chrome. These are the steps:

1. Toggle Read Mode (press F9)
2. Open the Save as dialog box (press Control+S)
3. Press tab to select Save as type, and use the arrow keys to choose "Text files"
4. Make sure the file will be saved in the right directory and press enter to save the file

Now, I have found the following problems with this method:
- Read mode is not available on every website. Interactive websites such as Facebook Messenger don't support read mode. I'm guessing the site you want to use will support it since it's mostly text.
- NVDA doesn't give me any feedback when I press F9 telling me whether I'm on read mode or not
- Strangely enough, it seems like I need to save the page twice for it to be saved as a text file, or I need to absolutely hit Enter when selecting "Text files" in the save as type dropdown menu.

I hope this is helpful. Please let us know how it goes.

2018-07-12 02:43:53

Another solution would be to copy-past the text you want to save and paste it in word, but not using Control+V but using the following sequence: Alt - H - V - T, which is the sequence to access Ribbon - Home - Paste - Keep text only

2018-07-12 10:59:42

@Ronand, thanks for the advice, but I don't use firefox, last time I tried it it slowed my computer down to a crawl, and while that was a good while ago, I don't feel the need to experiment again , not with apparent accessibility issues in latest versions of firefox and when Chrome is working out so well otherwise, I'm just a little surprised that this is something rather simple Ie can do that chrome apparently cannot.

I'm also afraid I'm not sure what you mean about alt h v t either, last I checked the only way to copy and paste was the conventional way, with control c and control v nwhich I'd prefer to avoid if possible as its a little too easy to miss things if your not careful, or end up with html code you don't want in the wrong place.

I tried alt h but it did nothing  most sites like this one and google, and on a couple of others just got me to the home link which wouldn't really be too helpful in saving as text files.

As I said, it actually seems this is something Ie can do that chrome just cannot, which I find rather astonishing when its such a basic function, but there you go.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-07-12 17:12:26

Greetings @dark!

The only option I found for your situation, is the following extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta … eabaddhgne

, which saves files as "google docs" files.

For viewing/editing, either visit

http://drive.google.com/

or via the "Back Up And Sync" application which ya can grab from

http://google.com/drive/download

2018-07-15 05:02:59

Hi @Dark,

Not using Firefox is fair enough. I'm lucky that I have a laptop with enough RAM to handle it. In that case I suppose the Chrome extension proposed by @Trenton is the way to go.

I also want to elaborate a bit more on the other possible solution I posted: apart from the traditional Control+C Control+V copy and paste commands, you also have the option to copy and "keep text only", which basically is a way to copy content without copying the format given by the HTML from the web. Pasting text like this will get rid of any unnecessary HTML text when you copy from the internet into Word. To paste text this way, without any HTML code in your text, you have to use the sequence I described above in Word: Alt - H - V - T. You may already know this so I Hope I'm not being redundant, but Alt - H - V - T is not a keyboard combination, but a keyboard sequence, which means you have to press one key after the other, first Alt then H then V then T in Word in order to paste without any HTML. But you're absolutely right it's best to avoid having to copy-paste because it is just too easy to miss parts of the text, and I didn't know you could save pages as text files from IE!

Cheers,

2018-07-15 05:20:41

@Trenton, I am afraid the google docs thing probably isn't what I'm looking for, all I want to do is have a quick way to save the entire text of a webpage so I can go and look at it later with any word processing program without any html code getting in the way. Needing to use google drive or online services for this would sort of be a bit redundant.

I've done this for years with everything from gamefaqs walkthrus, to bios of mega man characters and transcripts and now have quite the library, which is why i'd like to be able add to it, particularly since going to the front page of buffyworld where I get my buffy transcripts from gives an error, so whether the site is being maintained I don't know, hence why I like to have the transcripts on my pc for future reference.

@Ronand, I see the confusion when you said a key combo I thought you meant one in chrome, not in word. While a way of removing html might come in handy at some point, as you said yourself, copy and paste is a little too easy to mess up, as well as being more time consuming than just going "save as"

This pc at least probably would have the ram to handle firefox even though my older machine didn't, but problems in the past don't encourage me to  try it when chrome is working out so well and apparently recent firefox versions have had their issues. I probably should try Firefox at some point just for comparison, but I really can't be bothered when chrome is working out for me so well and I've already converted 18 years worth of Ie favourites over to chrome bookmarks, as well as having a saved offline copy.

Getting back to the text file issue, I don't mind loading up Ie just to download transcripts, it just seems rather odd to me Chrome doesn't have what is seemingly an extremely basic function.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2018-07-15 07:27:41

@dark

An alternative Firefox browser ya may wish to have a look at, is called "Waterfox," and can be found at

https://www.waterfoxproject.org

Its more based on the "classic" way that Firefox originally was, and original add ons are still supported, unlike the new "extensions" Firefox is going with now.