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PG Offline => Wish List => Topic started by: mra on February 29, 2004, 11:27:17 AM

Title: save digest as text file
Post by: mra on February 29, 2004, 11:27:17 AM
The title pretty much says it all.  :)
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: Wilson Logan on February 29, 2004, 02:42:05 PM
Hi,

Re: txt files... I'd have included export in other formats right from the first version but for one problem... ownership. Making it easy to strip Yahoo messages & port them to another forum format or BBS would lead to people 'stealing' groups from owners & could get me in hot water with them & maybe even Yahoo.

OK, yes, you *can* write a VBscript or Access macro to strip out the HTML and render the messages as text but if you're that good a programmer you could have just written a Perl script ripper to download the messages as text, direct from Yahoo.

It's unfortunate that I cannot offer people with a perfectly legitimate use for alternative formats this facility due to a minority of abusers.


Sorry,

Wilson.
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: mra on March 05, 2004, 05:50:31 PM

Ah ok, I understand. I've found a workaround though, I have PDFWriter installed, so I can collect messages that are of particular interest and save them in a pdf file. For personal use only, of course.
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: Wilson Logan on March 05, 2004, 10:57:36 PM
PDF sounds good.

How much is the writer?

Cheers,

Wilson.

Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: ginahoy on March 09, 2004, 07:12:55 PM
Quote from: Wilson Logan on March 05, 2004, 10:57:36 PM
PDF sounds good.
How much is the writer?

Hi Wilson,
What he was referring to is the full acrobat program. Retail shown on Adobe's website is $300. The way it works is you "print" to the acrobat print driver, which creates the pdf file.
David
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: Wilson Logan on March 09, 2004, 11:34:22 PM
$300.. not for everyone's pocket then :(

Wilson.
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: scubaman on March 16, 2004, 01:46:13 AM
Why use acrobat?  Why not simply any old text editor?  I must be missing something!

Rich
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: ginahoy on March 16, 2004, 02:28:02 AM
Quote from: scubaman on March 16, 2004, 01:46:13 AM
Why use acrobat?  Why not simply any old text editor?  I must be missing something!
Rich
See Wilson's reply #1 above...
I think MRA was just pointing out how he was able to use Acrobat's pdfwriter (print driver) to capture output from pgoffline.
David
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: scubaman on March 16, 2004, 03:05:22 AM
I understand.  I have full Acrobat and know how it works  :)  I just think that using Acrobat is not necessary.  If I understand right, mra does a search, then uses the print function to print to pdfwriter.  Instead, you can also select all (ctrl-A) and copy and paste into an editor or word processor.  Any html editor will do.  Frontpage, MS Word.

Regards,
Rich
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: maisnam on April 21, 2004, 09:22:17 AM
There is a Perl script which does just that - downloads the raw text from Yahoo Groups.
http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~zeitlin/yahoo2mbox.html (http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~zeitlin/yahoo2mbox.html)
But this script also gets blocked after about 250 messages - due to Yahoo's infamous IP block!

- Bobby

Quote from: Wilson Logan on February 29, 2004, 02:42:05 PM
OK, yes, you *can* write a VBscript or Access macro to strip out the HTML and render the messages as text but if you’re that good a programmer you could have just written a Perl script ‘ripper’ to download the messages as text, direct from Yahoo.
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: phazei on May 12, 2004, 09:15:49 PM
Hmm...  porting an entire group...  I was just thinking about that and I don't think it would cause anyone any problems.  While it would be f*cked up it still wouldn't cause any legal problems.  I believe yahoo groups would fall the same as nntp (usenet) news groups.  Once it's posted it's public domain and noone owns their posts.  I haven't read the yahoo agreement though.  So while it would probably piss people off, it wouldn't be illegal.

-Adam
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: gavmac on May 15, 2004, 08:49:56 AM
There is a Freeware (GPL) PDF writer whose files are only slightly larger than Adobe's.

It is avail here :-http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

download :-  PDFCreator-0_8_0_AFPLGhostscript.exe
from the files area, it is also avail in different languages
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: nightstitcher on July 21, 2004, 04:32:49 AM
What I do is copy and paste into my editor. I find that Word works the best in terms of preserving line-breaks where appropriate. It does have the annoying property of putting all the info into a table, but I wrote a Word macro to fix that:

Sub ConvertAllTablesCR()
For Each t In ActiveDocument.Tables
t.Select
Selection.Rows.ConvertToText Separator:=wdSeparateByParagraphs
Next
End Sub
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: Pbow on August 23, 2004, 03:42:03 PM
I tried to export the digest by printing to pdf.  I would be happier with the result if the text size wasn't so big... wastes a lot of paper.

I suppose I could copy/paste to word, adjust the text size and then print the result to pdf but I'm lazy... and with a large archive that would take a lot of extra time.

So my feature request is the ability to adjust the text size of the digest before printing.

cheers and thanks for a great program.
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: Wilson Logan on August 23, 2004, 10:41:19 PM
I'd love to be able to offer that but what you're seeing in a digest isn't pure text, its HTML. Changing the font size means going through every message & parsing all the 'size' and 'font' tags. It'd be time consuming and hit & miss at best.

The reason I'd like to offer it is really for accessability for visually impaired users & I'm annoyed that its not really feasible.

Sorry,

WIlson.
Title: Re:save digest as text file
Post by: adegutis on August 26, 2004, 09:15:08 PM
Free PDF print driver to create PDF files (i.e. save $300):

CutePDF Writer
http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/Writer.asp

The only limitation I found is that it won't write to a network shared/mapped drive. Just send it to a local disk and it works great!

Al