You have Word or WordPerfect  for wordprocessor. It can set the text up in columns, so you can save normally if you dont want to use the result on the internet. The version for the internet, you must save as plain text-file, with .htm as extension, AND YOU WON'T HAVE ANY COLUMNS THERE UNLESS YOU MAKE THEM AS A TABLE (not in older browsers anyway).
In this example I will use BBC World Service's schedule page as example. The saving for 4 weeks schedule was 30 pages (39 pages before, 9 after). I add a few items from other pages, where it is useful.

A few tricks for the newcomer   :-)
Open your browser. Open the page you will copy from. (In this example: The first week's schedule listed on http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/schedules). Open WordPad, or Word or WordPerfect. Notice that you can change from WordPad to browser and back. To do this either use the line of icons at the bottom of your screen, or hold down Alt and press Tab (Tab is the button to the left of 'q' with two arrows on it. If you havent done this before: Notice that you get a little screen with icons of the programmes, which are open at the time. Hold Alt down and push Tab until the frame around the icon is around the icon of the program you want, the release Alt)

When you have the browser open, see, that the text you want to re-style is there, then hold down Ctrl and press A. This marks everything on the screen (this ought to work in other Windows-programs as well). Now hold down Ctrl again and press C. This copies the text you just marked.

Now change to WordPad. (Push the icon on the status line or use the Alt+Tab-trick). Press Ctrl+V. This inserts the text you just marked in WordPad. It inserts both the text you want, and a lot of text you dont want. Any pictures are replaced by something as or . Most of the unwanted text is easy to remove, because it consists of the same text, which is repeated each time the browser shows a new piece of the text you want. You can remove the unwanted text very easily after that you have found and captured all the text you want to keep.

And now to the real work
 

  1. Open your browser. Open the wordprossessor you will use. I prefer WordPad for the first part of the work, but Word and WordPerfect will also work. Open the page you will copy from. Press Ctrl+A to mark it, then Ctrl+C to copy it.
  2. Change to WordPad. Write the heading you want over the text. Then press Ctrl+V to insert the text.
  3. If there is more than one page of material, that you want, then change back to the browser. Find the next page-full of text, and copy it (by pressing Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C). Go back to WordPad and insert it (by Ctrl+V). The cursor should be in the right place. Each time the information is form a new day or you want to enter a heading, do so before pressing Ctrl+V. (If you enter dates, the enter them in another format than the one, the database uses. You may change it back later).
  4. When you have copied all the information you need, then save the result as a local file, as a Word or WordPerfect-file if you only use the result locally, as a plain text-file, with the extention .htm if you will use it as an internet page (e.g. bbc.htm or bbc.html). When you search for it, you may have to search for 'All files', not 'Text files'.
  5. Find and remove the headings and other unwanted material from the document. This is done by finding the first part of the heading, which you won't find another place, and search for it, using Ctrl+B.
  6. Search for the tag by pressing Ctrl+B (or what letter the search option has in your language version) and entering as search caracter. Click outside the search box and remove the unwanted stuff.
  7. If you don't want to publish the result on the internet, set it up in so many columns that most entries are one line. You do that by pressing Ctrl+A, then finding Columns under Formats. Then select the smallest font size that you can read. If there is unwanted text in it, then remove it, otherwise you have finished with the work.
  8. Check that the result is as wished before you print it out.

If you want to publish on the net, see below. The text that you have now will show as a lot of text with no line breaks, if you just paste it into a table as it is. You'll need to do some of the things I describe here:

Getting rid of unwanted text

  1. You will find that a lot of the text are headings, dates, etc., which you don't need. It takes up a lot of room. So we start searching and replacing using Crtl+H. You can replace the text that repeats that way. In Word and WordPerfect you can also replace extra line feeds etc. with the things that are more useful. The button Replace All  does the trick.
  2. If you have the entries in this format:

    00:00 News
    00:05 Sport of the world

    then it is easy. Open the document in Word or WordPerferct and replace all the Returns with Return+
    , that is a Return-mark (new line) (^p) and the tag
    .
  3. If not, then you must still make sure that the text is divided up in the right entries. This is done by the same means as if you used Wordpad as text processor, see here.
  4. You may now do a few things to remove extra spaces and other caracters that have no effect in HTML. The result in an HTML-browser is the same, but you have to download all the caracters (In a word processor the result is not the same). It make the document smaller, that is faster to download.
  5. First you several spaces with one space. Then replace space+Return with Return and Return+space with Return. Finally replace several Returns with two Returns.

Making the text into a table

An internet document has no columns and no effort made to fit it unto a page. That will no doubt be fixed, but this will give you a result that the user can print out without wasting too much paper.

If you have a HTML editor, then do this:

  1. Open the editor and make a new (blank) document. If possible, do this without closing the document. Now make an empty table with 4 columns (or whatever fits the text).
  2. Mark about one quater of the text. Transfer it to one column by copying it from the Word or WP document, and pasting it to the column. Do the same with the other 3 quarters.

If you don't have a HTML editor:

  1. On top of the text, write:

    <HTML><BODY Bgcolor="FFFF00" TEXT="FF0000">


    The first line is how you start a document in the HTML language, when you don't have a header. The background color will be yellow, the text will be red (Write TEXT="000000" to get black text).
    The second is how you start a table that fills the whole screen width, and is the tag for a new row in the table.
  2. At the bottom of the text, write:

    </TABLE></BODY></HTML>

    This closes the table, the body of the document and the document itself.
  3. Find the top of the text and write:

    <TD WIDTH="25%">

    (Below the <TR>>-tag)
    Write the same tag at a good place in the middle of the text, and one quarter down, and three quarters down the text. You have now split the text into 4 columns.
  4. Save the result with the ending .htm or .html in a folder that you can find easily. Open the resulting page in your browser, to see if you want to adjust it. You can move the <TD> tag around to make the columns shorter or longer (in the Word- or WP-document), then save and see the result in the browser.
  5. If you want to put some text in before the table, then write it between the <BODY> tag and the <TABLE> tag. You can add text below the table by writing it between the </TABLE> tag and the </BODY> tag.

    6. Check that the result is as wished before you print it out or publish it.

    If you will use the result on the internet, then save as plain text file with the right name and the .htm or .html-name, and open it in Netscape or MSIE to see if it is OK. Then upload it as usual.

    Good luck

    carsten_niel@geocities.com


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