How To Properly Copy Source Code
For Later Viewing Or Manipulation

Reading articles on the net, particularly lengthy or involved ones may not be to your liking, especially when it ties up your only phone line.

When you see something you really like, I would recommend you copy the source code for the page and use your browser to read it later at your convenience. This will help preserve any tables for proper viewing. But depending on your browser, this may not be so easy as you think.

Under a VIEW menu, or with Command E, you should be able to call up the html code for any page you are currently looking at. Once you do this, if you just save it, it may not save it properly in the original style, depending on the browser. Some will and some won't, but most will save them as a browser specific file, and that's not always handy.

To save it properly, it is best to Select All or high light the entire page, copy it to the clip board, and then open up your favorite word processing application. Start a new file and simply paste the page's contents into that file.

Now, browsers like text files, so this new file must be saved AS a text file. You can save it as a text file and append the suffix .txt or .html on the end - assuming that's important for your computer.

NOTE: If you try to save this file as an html file, your application may try to convert it into html code in a WYSIWYG style. Do NOT do this. It is already in an html format, probably. If you do that, your browser will display the html code and not display the page the way it is supposed to look.

Remember, the point is to make a text file your browser will read and display properly, just as it does when it pulls it from the internet, and that is made with your favorite text editing application so you can manipulate it if you wish with a program you are already familiar with.

Open a page and then look at its source code. If you tell your browsers to save it, it may not save it in the manner you wish and will likely not look proper later. Go figure. Some browsers are funny like that. And even if they do save it properly, you cannot as easily manipulate the file with the browser application, but would rather have a text editor's native file to work with.

If you copy the source code into a text editor, then save it as a text file, not only will your browsers display it properly, but also if you need to manipulate this text with your editor, it is an editor you already know how to use. Once manipulated, you could email the file as an attachment to your friend, for example, and he or she should be able to handle a text file. Your friend's text editor will more likely recognize your text editor, or he or she can manipulate the text more easily if it is in that text editing format rather than a browser format.

In this way, when you use your browser to open that file, it will look virtually the same as it did on the Internet where you found it. Graphics may be missing, however, but I suspect you are more interested in the text. If you wish to preserve the graphics, you'll have to down load all of them too and probably place them in the same folder as this new text file so it knows where to find them, assuming it used local links. Hopefully, this will work.

Finally, it may be the case different email applications encode attached files differently too, but the actual body of the email text is usually clean. Thus, one may have to send the actual html code in the body of an email letter to someone if they wish it to be viewed properly. Once there, they can usually copy and paste it in any application they wish.

If none of this still works for you, well, what do I know about computers? No doubt not much, as my experiences are limited to the MAC and NetScape and/or Internet Explorer, and other machines or browsers or applications may do wildly different things. But hey, I tried to tell you what I could. Good luck.

If you'd like to email me any comments you may have on this material, feel free to do so.

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