save digest as text file

[mra]

The title pretty much says it all.  :)

[Wilson Logan]

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.

[mra]

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.

[Wilson Logan]

PDF sounds good.

How much is the writer?

Cheers,

Wilson.

[ginahoy]

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

[Wilson Logan]

$300.. not for everyone's pocket then :(

Wilson.

[scubaman]

Why use acrobat?  Why not simply any old text editor?  I must be missing something!

Rich

[ginahoy]

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

[scubaman]

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

[maisnam]

There is a Perl script which does just that - downloads the raw text from Yahoo Groups.
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

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.

[phazei]

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

[gavmac]

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

[nightstitcher]

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

[Pbow]

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.

[Wilson Logan]

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.