[Solved] Editing webpages in Writer

[gramail]

Does anyone have any ideas about making it easier to edit html webpages in Writer?
I frequently want to save webpages extracting only the relevant text without all the banners, frames, adverts, links, tables etc, but preferably retaining fonts and other text layouts. What I do is I save the page as a webpage from within my browser (Firefox, of course...!), then later open it in Writer and try to remove all the clutter before saving as an .odt or .doc file. The first problem is that I can never copy just the sections I want as the cursor jumps in selection to the end of the file even when off the visible screen. It takes several copies into new files to whittle a heavily cluttered webpage down, and even then I am often left with one stubborn table boundary which won't be separated from the text.

This is the one major issue I still have after competing my transfer from Word, and is the only common task which I miss Word for, otherwise Writer is smoother, more flexible and more powerful in nearly every respect.

Thanks for any tips! Gramail

[probe1]

as this don't help with your basic problem: you can skip step one by opening a web page in OOo directly...

[floris v]

I wouldn't edit html in Writer - for the simple reason that so far it saves html as 3.2, and we now have html 4.0 at the least. If you want to edit html, get a decent html editor, like Arachnophilia. You can also use Notepad or a plain text editor and view the result of your editing in your browser. That way you will also see the effects of css and javascript.

[probe1]

I agree: using the right tool is best.
But for the task of deleting... though I never tested loading heavily equipped HTML pages and edit them

[bsnipes]

The best tool that I have found for what you want to do would be Firefox with the Scrapbook extension. You can capture the page ( or portion of a page ) with Scrapbook then use it's easy delete option to remove the ads and other junk you don't want. Then select the entire section that is left and paste it into Writer. That keeps the formatting intact for you.

Brian

[gramail]

Thanks Brian, this 'Scrapbook' works perfectly for my needs! regards Graham