I’m out here in California at a friend’s house. I did not bring a computer. I want to give a presentation in a room with no Internet access. Everything that I want to show is a Web page.
How I would do this with a Windows machine: In MSIE, bookmark the pages of interest and click the “make available for viewing offline”. Time consumed: two clicks per page, one to bookmark and one to check the offline box.
Problem: Everyone out here has Macintoshes. They spend a lot of time congratulating themselves on how greatly superior their computer is to anything that ever came out of Microsoft. Yet none of these hip sophisticated computing geniuses has any idea how to do what you can do with Windows, i.e., make a Web page available offline. Is it so much easier to use their computer than to use a Windows machine that they haven’t bothered to learn to use the Macintosh OS? Or is the Macintosh/Safari/Firefox/whatever incapable of doing what Windows/MSIE can do?
What should I do?
In Safari, select File: Save As
Format: Web Archive.
Or print to PDF.
Colin
You should try the absolutely most obvious thing you could possibly think of, that works in every other application:
File / Save As…
Use the default “Web Archive” format.
Please don’t blame Mac OS X for your friends’ ignorance. In Safari, all you have to do is go to each page of interest and save it as a Web Archive from the File menu. Equally easy.
It may not be obvious but filefox will open files with an htm ot html extension and follow relative urls.
Start with file://yourpage.html
If files are all in same directory should work.
In Firefox you can do File/Save Page As/Web Page Complete and get a full copy on your local hard drive of everything needed to render the page. It’s a pain to do manually if you have a lot of pages, but if it’s just a few it works fine. Firefox also has a “Work Offline” mode, but I think all that does is have it try to load pages from a cache and may not be very useful in practice.
Colin, Jin: Suppose I save them all to a local directory? Then what? Open them again as local files and bookmark those files once open? That seems a lot more cumbersome than on Windows, but better than installing a lot of extra software.
You could do that, or just leave them as local files and open them using the Finder. In some of its views, you can order by creation date, so the files come up in the order you saved them in.
Er, why are you bothering to rebookmark them? The Web Archive is a file (well, not really. It’s actually a directory, but for the purposes of our discussion it’s a file), just double click it. Or lasso the whole batch and double click or something.
Sure, it’s different from Windows, but considering it isn’t Windows that shouldn’t be surprising.
You can select all the pages together and drag them as one to the bookmarks bar.
If you want to reorder them, drag them around to where you want them, or click the book icon at the left of the bookmarks bar to open the editor, where you can move them into the bookmarks menu if you wish
(I’m refering to selecting the web archive pages on your desktop or in the folder where you saved them.)
… however (sorry for the serial posts) …
The way I’d do it is to command-S web archive (use .archive extension and save to a new folder to keep things tidy) for all the files, and then double-click on the entry page web archive to start your presentation.
From there on, just click on the links in the web archive pages, which should work if you saved the target pages also as web archives. In other words, rather than bookmark, just navigate within the pages.
I’m assuming here that you’re demoing a single, interlinked Web site. If not, see my previous comments.
wget works pretty well on Mac OS X. I’m not certain if it is part of the standard distribution though.
For presentations I typically use Paparazzi, although a useful command line alternative is webkit2png.
wget does not ship with OSX, but curl does.
If you do want wget, it is available at http://wget.darwinports.com/
Working very nicely with Safari now, thanks to you folks. I saved all of the Web archives to a folder, then viewed it ordered by date. I dragged that into the bookmarks folder of Safari. I ended up having to reorder everything manually as the bookmarks folder pop-up is not consistent with the file explorer pop-up and doesn’t have a “sort by date modified” option. I managed to get this subfolder within bookmarks onto a menu bar just above the Web pages themselves and now it is easy to pull-down one page after another.
On a side note… you’d think that wanting to show a bunch of Web pages in sequence would be a pretty common way to give a presentation these days and the browser would have some way to support this, e.g., a “presentation mode” where you queue up a bunch of URLs (possibly as a subfolder of bookmarks) and the browser would then sprout an extra set of forward/back buttons (or maybe use the existing ones) to cycle among them. Though perhaps this is simply feature bloat…
you could always use the ‘curl’ command from the built in Mac shell (aka ‘Terminal’). A little technical but you can probably suck down whatever you want on one command, then read it offline whenver….
DESCRIPTION
curl is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the
supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, DICT, TELNET, LDAP
or FILE). The command is designed to work without user interaction.
curl offers a busload of useful tricks like proxy support, user authen-
tication, ftp upload, HTTP post, SSL (https:) connections, cookies,
file transfer resume and more. As you will see below, the amount of
features will make your head spin!
The presentation is over. It ended up not working very well. The newer Intel-based Macintosh that I had saved the Web pages on couldn’t drive the older video projector. We copied the folder over to a middle-aged Macintosh G4 and the projector worked fine, but the pages didn’t render well in Safari; it looked as though the style sheets were missing.
I’ve been using macs since the 1980’s and I think Safari sucks. The only thing going for it is that it boots quickly.
Don’t get me started on Spotlight, it has ruined my macintosh experience.
My question is how to open a Safari webarchive file after sending it to someone with a pc?
With Firefox you can just install the slogger extension and go from there. A great solution for offline reading.
Firefox with the Scrapbook extension is EXACTLY what you needed (the Slogger extension is huge overkill for all but the most powerful narcissists who want to preserve their websurfing behavior for future generations to admire). Scrapbook lets you manage saved webpages in the same organizational idiom as managing bookmarks — when you’re done, you have a slideshow of static pages, each of which took a mouse click to bring into the directory you defined for the extension. Problem solved for next time.
what if you have to save a page with a video on it? i can’t figure out a way to save it for offline use without having to download some special application to do it for me.. suggestions please?
p.s. i’m a mac user and proud of it!
I’m here from a Google search from the same issue — Mac offline browsing. My solution ended up being CocoaWget 2.7.0 ( http://en.cocoawget.nobody.jp ), a graphical front end to WGet. Unfortunately I couldn’t seem to redirect the output directory, but one directory per site on the desktop was fine for me..