Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush, please forgive me.

December 13, 2009 11:02 AM

I have a word document composed of multiple text files. I'd like to highlight the good parts, push a button, and have those quotes automatically excerpted and pasted into a new document. Bonus points if the title of each article were retained above the respective excerpt. Is there a slick and easy way to do this using mac or web-based applications?

Bonus points if the title of each article were retained above the respective excerpt. I also have Textwrangler and Tex-edit, and I suppose it might be possible to cobble something together using "copy lines containing [x]

I also own DevonThink but haven't played with it much. I guess I'm really fishing around for a workflow for annotating and excerpting bits from electronic documents with a few short keystrokes.

Thanks for your patience with this rambling, ill-formed request!

posted by mecran01 to Education (3 answers total)

Hold the Ctrl key down and use the mouse to highlight the titles and desired passages. Then ^C to copy, start a new document, ^V to paste. Not very automated though.
posted by davcoo at 12:00 PM on December 13, 2009

Record a Macro to perform the steps that davcoo listed above. Tools, Macros, record a macro. You may have to start a the beginning of the line and incorporate a shift-End at the beginning of your Macro. You can also learn about and edit the macro code for more powerful customization of it.
If you have Office 07 its somewhere on the awesomeness that is the "ribbon"
posted by ijoyner at 12:28 PM on December 13, 2009

Response by poster: The ribbon is where hope goes to die. But thanks, I'll try this.
posted by mecran01 at 5:32 AM on December 15, 2009