+79
Completed

Parse clipped HTML for links and basic formatting, and save it in notes

Anonymous 14 years ago updated by Alex Jenter 7 years ago 17

When clipping text from web browser, CintaNotes should keep the links which are in the text.

taking/clipping complexity:hard

 Hi priority on my list of needs, not just wants.

3 years ago "planned", I doubt if this is going to happened. :( This is really important for note taking. Please do "start" this even it is "Hard". Thank you.

Sorry for being slow, but slow is better than a dead project - and CintaNotes by no means is dead yet :) Currently there are 26 ideas which have a higher score, so as you can see, even with an army of developers it would take a while. But you can do something about it - e.g. tell all your friends about CN and get them to vote for this feature!

Added my vote. Clipping text with urls in it is something I do a lot of and manually inserting the urls into the clipped text takes a lot of time. This is my specific use case. I clip a lot of text from websites. Often, text from websites has a URL in it. When you clip the text, only the text is included - and URL's are discarded. That means to get all the contents of the original article, you have to right click the URL in your browser, copy the link, and then paste that into the note inside CN. It would be great if - when you clip text that has a URL in it - CN would include that URL (as a click-able link) in the note. Here is an example:
Test test test Google test.

When clipped, that text becomes:
Test test test Google test.

What I want is this:
Test test test Google http://www.google.com test.

So CN detects that 'Google' is a URL, and includes the URL after the word in the clipped text.
Actually if CN would parse links, then it would be easy to keep the friendly names - CintaNotes now supports it.
But the difficult part is parsing. Sometimes links are implemented via JavaScript, and here it would be impossible to do anything. So CN will understand only plain <a href=></a> tags. 
Even parsing plain <a href=> tags would be a big help. 

Out of curiosity, I just looked at the source of a typical wikipedia page and found all the links had relative URLs like:

      <a href="/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Canada" title="Prime Minister of Canada">

Presumably, JavaScript code somewhere prepends the appropriate xx.wikipedia.org, where 'xx' is a language identifier.  I can see where this would be a much more difficult task. 

Thanks for the comment Gunars. Relative links would be easy to handle I think. It's Javascript links like "onclick="javascript:navigateToPage2();" that will be a real pain, probably even not worth trying..

This would be an absolutely fundamental feature. It's sorely lacking for my personal use. I mostly use CN as a knowledge manager, to file and index articles from the Web. Before that, I either bookmarked the article in Firefox (which is not good enough at indexing and search, and is useless in case the page disappears from the Web), or saved the Web page in mht, mhtml or (sometimes) maff format, when I wanted to be absolutely sure to find it again.


Saving in those formats is great because they preserve practically 100 % of what's useful, and still don't take much place. However, proper indexing does not exist with that method. Often I had to do both : bookmark the link, and save the page ; using different software, which further slows down operations.


CN brings indexing and easier search to the process, but many articles have a lot of hyperlinks which are at least as useful as the article itself.


I can live with the images not being saved in CN (although it definitely cripples the product's abilities), but the stripping of links is much more problematic.


I just had to save a Web article twice : one time in CN, to conform with my workflow, and another as mht under Windows Explorer, in order to preserve the links. And then, I had to create a link from the CN note to the mht file on my disk !


Clearly, this can be done from time to time, but if one had to do it regularly, it would completely break the fast clipping workflow which makes CN stand out from other tools.

Thanks for your comment! Glad to say that we are already working on this feature. Please stay tuned)

Completed

Released in version 3.6

It's great to be warned personally when this is implemented !


I just upgraded, and have noticed that while copying and pasting into an existing note does carry the links over now, it does not occur when creating a new note through Ctrl + F12. Is that expected behaviour ?

Hi Clairvaux, thanks for your comment! Please check if you have Options/Clipping/Formatting/Retain HTML activated. Note that you need a PRO license for this to work. (That it works without a license for pasting is an actually our oversight).

Thank you for your quick answer, Alex. I guess this won't be for me since I don't have a Pro licence.

It's a pity. We've put a lot of work into it. Note that there are ways to get a license with a huge discount, or even for free.