DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - SEP 2016
SAVING WEBPAGES AND ARTICLES TO PRESERVE OR READ LATER
©2016 Donald R. Snow -- This page was last updated 2016-10-25.
These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah
Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter.
They are also posted on my Freeware Corner Notes page on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where the links are active and there may be corrections, updates, and
additional information about the topic in other class notes
SAVING WEBPAGES
There are several reasons to save webpages, one of which is to read
them later when you have time. By saving them you can put them
on your mobile devices so you can read them while waiting at an
appointment, for example. Or you might just want to preserve an
article, since about one-fourth of all webpages on the Internet
change or are deleted every year. Another reason is that you
need access to a page while you are working on related things.
This Freeware Corner article discusses some tools and ways to do this.
POCKET
This is a free service available from
https://getpocket.com/ . Their slogan is, "To view later,
put it in POCKET." When you sign up for a free account, a small
icon is placed on your browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) in the upper
right corner, so when you find an article or website you want to save,
clicking on the icon saves the article to your POCKET account. I
don't know what limits they have as to size or number of articles you
can save, but at any given time I have 50 or more articles saved in my
free account. POCKET can be installed on all your computers and
mobile devices, so the articles are available to you anywhere.
Then, when you have a moment, click on the POCKET icon on your
smartphone and select an article to read. If you don't have time
to finish it then, the next time you open POCKET, it opens to the
point in the article where you left off. When you finish an
article, you can delete it or archive it and it will still be
available to read again, but won't show up in the active article list.
I've been using POCKET for a couple of years and find many articles
that I want to read, but not right then. The articles are sync'd
on my smartphone when I'm connected to my wireless Internet connection
at home, so I don't have to download them later. As an example,
I just went to my Freeware Corner notes page ( http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-freewarecornernotespage.html
), selected an article, and clicked on my POCKET icon. Within
seconds it was saved to my POCKET account and was sync'd
(synchronized) on my smartphone to read. I recommend POCKET
highly and I use it a lot. It makes saving articles to read later very
easy.
SAVE TO PDF
Adobe's Personal Document Format (PDF) is the most widely used format
for articles, books, manuals, etc., and there are many free programs
that will save articles to PDF or convert them from PDF to other
formats to read later. See some of my other Freeware Corner
articles for more information on such programs. Here I will just
discuss one or two programs for saving and reading PDFs. To save
to PDF I frequently use FastStone Capture. The last free version
of FastStone Capture was version 5.3 and that is still available from
several websites, including http://www.oldversion.com/windows/faststone-capture-5-3
. I used the free version for many years and liked it so much
that I paid the $19 for a forever-license for all new shareware
versions. They are up to version 8-something now. There
are many screenshot programs, most of them free, but this one has the
extremely useful feature of being able to save an entire scrolling
window or frame, not just the part you see on your monitor. Most
articles that I want to save are more than just one screen full, so
using FastStone Capture I can save the entire scrolling window as a
PDF. When I save the file, I name it so I know what's in it, and can
then read it on my computer or put it in Dropbox and copy it onto my
smartphone or tablet. To read PDFs on my computer I use a simple
PDF reader like SUMATRA ( http://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html
). To convert a PDF to Kindle epub or other ebook format
I add it to my CALIBRE program ( http://calibre-ebook.com/
) on my computer and convert it. Then, when connecting my
smartphone or tablet to my computer, it is automatically copied there.
The original PDF in Dropbox can also be read on my smartphone or
tablet with any PDF reader. The difference to remember with PDF
format is that PDFs are pictures of the text page, so you can't change
the font like you can in epub and some other formats. For
small-screen devices like smartphones epub format works better since
you can increase the font size without changing the entire page size,
unlike PDF.
SAVE TO EVERNOTE
The Basic version of EVERNOTE is free from https://evernote.com/
and is another program I use to save webpages and articles. You
set up a free account on EVERNOTE's home page and then install it on
your computers and mobile devices. The free version can only be
installed on any two of your devices, e.g. a smartphone and your home
computer, but you can use the web version in a browser on any of your
other devices. The commercial versions can be installed on any
number of devices. It can also be used on any computer or device
on which you can get to the Internet, e.g. on a computer at a Family
History Center. You log in to the EVERNOTE website with your
user name and password and then all your notes are available to
you. It has a Webclipper app that you can install in your
browser, so when you find a website to copy or an article to save,
click on the EVERNOTE Webclipper, fill in the tags and remarks you
want to save with it, and click Save. The webpage is then saved
to your EVERNOTE account and will be sync'd (synchronized) to all your
devices where you have installed EVERNOTE and in the web version on
your account. I use this to save webpages that have information
that I know I want to keep, not just read later. EVERNOTE can
also save PDFs by just draging-and-dropping them into notes.
These PDF notes are OCR'd (Optical Character Recognized) by EVERNOTE
and are then searchable in your EVERNOTE account. Some webpages
don't look good when saved by the EVERNOTE Webclipper, so I sometimes
use a "readability" program on the webpage first and then save that to
EVERNOTE.
SAVE TO PDF WITH YOUR BROWSER: CHROME, FIREFOX, OR EDGE
PDF has become so important that browsers now have a built-in feature
to save webpages to PDF. For Chrome right click anywhere on the
webpage or on the 3-horizontal-bar icon in the upper right corner,
then click the Print option and make sure it is set to Print to
PDF. When you click the Print button, it asks you what to name
the PDF file and where to put it. I leave my browser's default
print settings as Print to PDF, so I don't inadvertently print to
hardcopy, unless I actually want to. And even when I want to
print a hardcopy, I usually Print it to PDF first and then print that
to hardcopy. That way, I always have the original, if I need to
print more copies, and electronic copies are easier to find than paper
copies. This Print to PDF gives a good file of the entire page
and that may include a scrolling window. As mentioned above, the
PDF can then be copied to Dropbox and transferred to a mobile device
or can be converted to epub or other formats. The browser
FIREFOX has an easy way to set the font size, margins, headers, and
footers before printing to PDF, and I usually use it to print my
family history class notes, even though I use Chrome as my default
browser. When I teach a family history class, I first update
the class notes in html (computer jargon for "hypertext markup
language - the stuff you see in browsers), upload that to my webpage,
and then use FIREFOX to print that to PDF to make the
hardcopies. The new Microsoft EDGE browser in Windows 10 has
similar set-up features before printing to PDF.
CONCLUSION
Saving websites and articles, both for preservation and for reading
later is important, since the Internet changes so rapidly. You
can keep a copy of whatever you want on your own computer and/or
mobile devices to read or refer to later, regardless of how it
changes, or disappears, on the Internet. This Freeware Corner
article has only considered a few of the many options for doing
this. If you have a way that you like to use other than one of
these, please let me know. I will probably write another
Freeware Corner article with more ideas some other time.
=====================================