Editing local page makes SM hang
Summary
If you encounter problems with handling HTML in SuperMemo, try the following:
- select text to import before executing automatic import
- use filters F6 to remove some troublesome code
- convert portions of HTML to plain text
- edit the text in your favorite HTML editor
SuperMemo keeps changing, so does Internet Explorer. The problem below could not be reproduced in later years
Problem
Question:
Dirk W.: Starting to edit this page (already downloaded as local page) SuperMemo hangs and uses 99% of the systems resources. Making it impossible to make text extracts of the page.
Answer:
Indeed! If this can be resolved then probably only at the programming level. A sure workaround is not to import the entire page with scripts, but only the texts of interest (and for huge texts, even only its portions). Also filtering all extras may help (F6). To defend the quality of SuperMemo, the problem occurs at the level of Internet Explorer. It handles such texts without a glitch in display mode, but trips at editing (which requires far more resources). In other words, all SuperMemo can do is to cut out troublesome portions of HTML. However, importing pages as local pages probably takes the whole page 'as is'. Hence the problem.
Workarounds:
Recommended:
For this particular case: if you click before or at Introduction and then Shift+click at the end of the Summary then the text will import and work without trouble (Ctrl+C in the browser and Ctrl+Alt+N in SuperMemo). This will get rid of the 50% of useless HTML/script (uninformative junk carried by the page such as java scripts, search boxes, table of contents, logo, headers, metatags, buttons, stylesheets, frames, etc. - one or more of them are the cause of IE collapsing in editing mode). Unfortunately, this is the recommended way for most professional web pages that are packed with bells and whistles that you do not need in incremental reading
Other:
If you use F6 after the import with Remove tables checked (plus the defaults such as scripts, frames, buttons, etc.), you will be able to work with the text as well. It seems IE cannot carry the heavy load of tables in the text. The workaround above is better in that you will not have to spend time on deleting all the junk texts that surround the article.