Make.text

Make.text is a bookmarklet for turning a web page into Markdown syntax.

It works in Firefox 2 (Linux and Mac), Safari 2 (Mac), Konqueror 3.5 (Linux), and Opera 9 (Linux and Mac).

It does not work in Internet Explorer (and I don’t have a Windows machine to debug it on).

I’m told it does not work with Omniweb 5.5.

To install it, drag » Make.text « to your bookmarks toolbar.

To use the bookmarklet, visit the web page you want to convert, and click on the “Make.text” item in your toolbar. A new window will open with the Markdown syntax for the page.

If you use Firefox, the Aardvark extension is a useful companion tool. Aardvark lets you delete elements from a web page in your browser. I use it before Make.text to get rid of ads and other content that I don’t want to save.

License

Known Issues

• Anchors are not handled.
• Make.text should make better use of computed styles; right now it only uses them to omit elements that are not displayed.
• The following example is not handled well:

  <a href="foo"><h1>bar</h1></a>
  

  There’s no way to translate this into Markdown syntax using both [][] and #. I might try

  # [bar](foo)
  

  as a reasonable approximation.
• Sometimes extra paragraphs are inserted in nested lists. Markdown is a little quirky here (sometimes a blank line before a list element (*) causes a paragraph to be inserted, sometimes not).

Release history

• December 19, 2007. Version 1.5.
• October 6, 2006. Version 1.4.
• October 5, 2006. Version 1.3.
• October 3, 2006. Version 1.2.
• October 2, 2006. Version 1.1.
• October 1, 2006. Initial release version 1.0.

—Trevor Jim