Is there a way to save other file types (word, excel docs etc.) in the knowledge base or conversely can surfulator docs be saved in Windows Explorer?

Hi Jim,
Not at present, but this will be added reasonably soon. ie. You will be able to add any file as an Attachment to an article and these will be stored in the Knowledge Base in a compressed format to save space.

You can add links to external files however. To do this go into edit mode on an Article field, select some text you want to use for the link and press Ctrl+K. To link to a file select "file" from the Type list.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you want here. Can you please explain further.

__________________
Neville Franks,
Author of ED for Windows and Surfulater

Hi Jim,
A belated update on this. The ability to attach files (Word, PDF, Excel, Zip et.all) was adding back in the V1.80, B0.0 release.

The next release V1.94, B0.0 makes it even easier to attach files to Surfulater articles, as well as including a range of other nice new features.

__________________
Neville Franks,
Author of ED for Windows and Surfulater

I would add to this that, at least for users of Office 2003 or the new 2005, saving for instance word docs as XML or as HTML will make them even better candidates for attaching them to an article in surfulater. Surfulater appears to be very xml-driven: the main 'database' is an xml file at least, while binary files such as images are stored in a separate binary storage file (I'm not sure, because I'm trying surfulater only for a day or so now). Thus, a word document would be stored in a binary format, while a 'WordML' or 'Word-as-html' stored file would possibly be stored as XML. At least it would be more in line with the aim to use open standards as much as possible in surfulater. Besides that, WordML files can be opened without having Word, if Microsofts plugin for IE is installed for viewing WordML files.

What I would very much like to see is the ability to to store non-Web articles, for example: Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, even text files.

What would be required is some VBA within Office or vbScript in the text editor to add the highlighted section and address to Surfulater (the same as for a web page except that it's either local or on a network somewhere) with all te same benifits!

I've done a few Office Add-Ins and would be willing to give this a go

Hi Perry,
As I mentioned above you can do this using Article | Attach File or right click | Attach File. See the Help Topic: "Attaching & Linking files to Articles".
The Surfulater Clipboard Hotkey and Article|New Article from Clipboard, enable you to copy selected content from other documents into Surfulater articles. See the Help topic: "Creating New Articles from the Clipboard".

I've only just had my first cup of coffee for the day/week and might not be completely in tune with your request.

__________________
Neville Franks,
Author of ED for Windows and Surfulater

Sure: that's OK, I understand that
Not sure if it should go somewhere else, I think I mentioned it in the ideas section of the download page...

When you create an article from a WebPage, I'm guessing it's something like this:

1. Create and store thumbnail
2. Get highlighted part of page and store in article
3. Get Meta Tags and url
4. Add Reference and Attachments

What I'd like to do is to be able to expose that functionality to VBA and other scripting technologies, so that the same type of thing can happen in other applications apart from Web Browsers, eg using VBA in Office applications or a scripting language in other applications, create a macro which will:

1. Create and store a thumbnail (a bit like window capture maybe?)
2. Get highlighted part of page and store in article (would need to convert it to HTML first, which isn't too difficult for office, simple for text, but could be more problematic for other apps -- probably fall back to plain text?)
3. Get MetaTags and url (for office applications the Document Description and keywords could be used; url = file address
4. Add Reference (file://C:/My Documents/file.doc) and Attachments

So, I'm not wanting just to attach other file types, but integrate them like the HTML pages have been. Does that make sense?

Regs,
Perry

Ok, got it. This should be easy to do as Surfulater uses XML to pass all the captured information across from the Browser. In fact another user is already doing this for one of his projects.

The XML spec is:
All content other than plain text should be XML CDATA. Best just to use CDATA for everything. Leave unused fields blank.

Basically create the text above along with whatever content you want captured and copy it to the Clipboard. Then start or activatate Surfulater and it will grab it and create shiny new article.

To include a thumbnail image create it with a name: "SULIEThumbnail.jpg" and place this in the folder Surfulater is installed in. It should be 74H x 60W - pixels.

For example code download the Surfulater Firefox Extension, Surfulater.xpi from the Download page, rename it to a Zip file and look in surfulaterOverlay.js at function BuildSurfulaterXfer().

Pretty neat huh! Let us know how you go.

__________________
Neville Franks,
Author of ED for Windows and Surfulater

I placed the XML in TextPad (or XMLSpy), select it and do "copy"
There is a popup above the system tray saying that an article is being created. I have to click on the popup to get rid of it, and there is no article in SUL.
Do I need to do the copy to clipboard from a program?

This will work fine from a text editor as long as the necessary fields are provided. The following examples work:

If there is a problem the SurfulaterLog.txt file in the Surfulater folder will provide info on the error. Something like:
The most likely errors are:
-3 template doesn't exist.
-8 couldn't find href in reference html field,
-9 couldn't find reference html field.
etc.

__________________
Neville Franks,
Author of ED for Windows and Surfulater