Copy As Text

[StormStrikes]

I do a lot of American Civics, History and Colonial era studies. As such I do a lot of research on line, particularly for historical documents, writings, and such. I detest, with a severe passion, reading stuff on line or on a computer (i.e., pdf, document, etc). I want to be able to print it out, highlight it, mark it up with notes, references, etc.

However, printing web pages out in general is far from ideal, particularly if the page is not coded to strip out ads, menus, etc. Its amplified with particularly long documents that can be sever 10's of pages if not hundreds of pages long and is further complicated by plain copy and paste as it retains much of the web formatting.

I teach some of my studies from time to time and love to be able to hand out well formatted, consistently styled documents. For a long time that meant I had to cut and paste, strip the formatting then reformat it to my liking. That is until I ran across a plug-in for Firefox called Copy As Text.

The time this plug-in has saved me has been immense. Granted, it strips the formatting from the start but when I paste it in a writer document, it is pasted using my font format and such. All I generally have to do is go back through the document and add the headings to generate the table of contents and any special styling to quotes and other such text. All in all, it saves a lot of time and I get a document formatted the way I want it, I get a table of contents and then I can create cover pages and such.

If I learned how to do my own binding I could create some very nice books. I have a couple gigabytes of historic documents now stored on my drive that are nicely formatted, consistently formatted and I can convert them to the other formats supported by OpenOffice (Well, LibreOffice now) easily and quickly and share them. The plug-in does strip the images out, so you have to go back and manually add those back in if you want them, but for my use, I dont have a lot of documents, particularly historical ones with images in them so that has not been a big issue.

So if you are like me and line nice, consistently formatted documents and cut and paste from the web a lot, do yourself a favor and get that plug-in.

[acknak]

Great tip!

You can also use Edit > Paste Special > As unformatted text in OOo. In fact, I wish that was the default for pasting from web pages; the web formatting is almost always more trouble than it's worth.