42441 - Save As plain text in navigator

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core Graveyard :: File Handling, defect, P3)

Description

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

In the Save As dialog, an option to save as other rendered formats would be very
useful. Lynx provides a similar feature, its (p)rint command allows you to save
the HTML document as plain text, with the rendering 'hardcoded' in.

I'm not sure if mozilla does postscript conversion internally to print, but if
it does, being able to Save As postscript would be very nice, as well.

Comment 1

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

RFE over to xpapps

Comment 2

[Jeremy M. Dolan]

Wow, just noticed this was in 4.7 linux. In that case, this is a must. Marking
4xp.

Comment 3

[Chris McAfee]

m20

Comment 4

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

Since Don has left, Vishy is taking his bugs in bulk, pending reassignment.
thanks,
	Vishy

Comment 5

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

This would require some work, not holding beta1 for it, though it would be nice 
to have. Marking nsbeta1-

Comment 6

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

pchen, what work are you referring to? We do have a HTML->TXT converter already
(it is used each time you sent a mail composed in the normal HTML editor as
plaintext). We just need to hook save as up.

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

*** Bug 45011 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> I'm not sure if mozilla does postscript conversion internally to print, but if
> it does, being able to Save As postscript would be very nice, as well.

This is available via the print command. Just print in a file. save as
postscript wfm.

Comment 9

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

updateing SUMMARY (sorry for spam).

Comment 10

[Jesse Ruderman]

This bug probably depends on bug 51798.

Comment 11

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 64705 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[hirata masakazu]

Why is this RFE if it is 4xp? This should be considered simply a bug, shouldn't it?
Besides, if there is no choice between text and source, it does not make sense
to have a menu item "Save (Page) As ..." with "...".

Comment 13

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

hirata, good point --marking this as normal, rather than enhancement.

Comment 14

[selmer (gone)]

The missing work seems to be the UI spec and its implementation.  I haven't
heard of any feedback that users are clamoring for this...

Comment 15

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

uh, i'm clamoring for it ;)

Comment 16

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> I haven't heard of any feedback that users are clamoring for this...

I have heard users asking for that.

Comment 17

[Jacek Piskozub]

Selmer, is that a spam bait? How many pewope should say they clamor for it? I'll
answer as the third in the good old AOL tradition:

Me too!

Comment 18

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

->pchen for triage, since vishy's away. would nsbeta1/mozilla0.9 be too
ambitious a timeframe?

Comment 19

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

nav triage: not a beta stopper. 

Comment 20

[basic]

is this bug related to bug 72009?

Comment 21

[Cathleen]

mail/news does for compose window for sending.  maybe we can leverage something 
there...

Comment 22

[Damian Christey]

*** Bug 64705 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 23

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

spam: over to File Handling. i have not changed the assigned developer [or the
other fields for that matter], so if anyone realizes that a bug should have a
more appropriate owner, go ahead and change it. :)

Comment 24

[Peter Trudelle]

Ben Goodger is working on saving stuff, especially this. -> ben

Comment 25

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Out HTML page Composer has an "Export to Text" feature since some time, you
might want to take a deep look at its implementation.

Comment 26

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Part of updated "Save As" work. 

Comment 27

[Dan Tobias]

Currently, the "Save As" feature includes "text file" as one of its options, but
when you select it, it still saves the HTML code (and doesn't change the default
save filename to end with .txt instead of .html).

This would be a nice thing to fix, since Netscape 4.x had a very good "Save As
Plain Text" option (much nicer than that of MSIE), generating a nice-quality
text mode rendering of the page, including tables and the ALT text of images.  I
used it a lot to get well-formatted plain text versions of Web pages.  It's a
shame that Mozilla, so far, is a regression from that.

Comment 28

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

Bug 118557 would be a cool way to implement this properly. :-)

Comment 29

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

There is no dependency. Bug 118557 might be a good way to improve the result of
the HTML->TXT converter, esp. for tables, but not that is even clear yet. In any
case, this bug is not really - it should just the the converter and not care how
the converter works. And I claim that the converter already works relatively
well without bug 118557.

Comment 30

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Fixed. Patch w/analysis in bug 120174. 

Comment 31

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

From the patch:

-    // XXX waiting for fix for 110135 to land
+// Still waiting for text conversion to work right
     // aFilePicker.appendFilter(bundle.GetStringFromName("TextOnlyFilter"),
"*.txt");


What does that mean? Define "work right". Why is that filter commented out?

Comment 32

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

works on linux rh7.2 and win2k, 2002.01.24.0x comm bits. [there are some other
issues, but they're covered by other bugs, like bug 120313.]

alas, unable to test on mac due to bug 107521. :( will verify this when that one
is fixed.

Comment 33

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 121865 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 34

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 70045 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 35

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

yep, this works on mac with recent os x builds, trunk and branch.

Comment 36

[Aaron Lawrence]

*** Bug 211067 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***