Newsletter macro

Questions & Suggestions
1

I am a relative novice in KM and want to put together a macro to automate my newsletter creation. I will be scouring many news stories and turning them into one sentence summaries with link at end.

After highlighting text in a story, I’d to be able to:

  • Paste that text into a dialogue box where I can rewrite to one sentence.
  • Hold that edited text.
  • Pull the article link into another dialogue box where I could reformat into a markdown link
  • Merge the two pieces (edited text)(markdown link) into a single block and save to clipboard.

Is something like that possible and what type actions would be best place to start?

2

I'd say it is possible, but it will definitely take a fair amount of work.

Perhaps this macro will help you get started:
Set Clipboard to RTF Hyperlink & Plain Text MD Link

Among other things, it allows you to select any text on a web page and create a Markdown link using that text and the page URL.

It would not be too hard to modify that to:

  • Save the selected text (either as plain text or rich-text) separately
  • Create the MD link using the web page title and URL
    • In fact, this option is already in the macro

Since you don't need BOTH a rich-text hyperlink and a plain-text MD link, that will greatly simplify the macro. Just use the parts that you need.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

3

Hey Dan,

Don't do that!   :smile:

Working in the very limited text editing environment of a dialog is a serious drag.

If you're editing plain text then use BBEdit.

The demo runs forever with a feature-set comparable with but superior to TextWrangler (which is being phased-out).

BBEdit is designed for editing text and is enormously scriptable, so it is a really good platform doing this kind of work. (It runs 24/7 on my system.)

Here's a very simple example:

Copy Selected-Text and send to a new BBEdit document:

Copy Text and Send it to BBEdit.kmmacros (3.3 KB)

Keyboard Maestro Export.png884×526 46.4 KB

Here's my Go-to-Last-App macro:

Activate Last Application.kmmacros (1.3 KB)

Keyboard Maestro Export.png883×297 25.8 KB

The ⌘⎋ keyboard shortcut is supremely easy for me to slap and return to the last application I was working in, so I can use a macro like send-to-BBEdit and instantly return to the app I was working in.

It is possible to append text to an existing document and all kinds of other good stuff.

Working with and transforming the text in a BBEdit is fairly straightforward, but you'll have to learn a little bit of AppleScript.

Let me know if you want to pursue this.

-Chris

4

Thanks JMichaelTX but that looks like more of a challenge than I want to tackle.

Come to think of it, is there a way to simply merge two clipboard items together – the story excerpt and the link?

If I have all the items in the clipboard history I can paste into Ulysses, where I write.

UPDATE Just tested Launchbar clipmerge and it does the trick. I think problem largely solved. Thanks.

5

You're right, that macro was overkill.

Here is a simple macro to get you started.
It uses Chrome, but can be easily changed to Safari.
Just select some text on a web page, and trigger the macro.
It puts everything you asked for on the clipboard, where you can paste into any app.

##Macro Library   Get Selected Text, Title & URL from Web Page


####DOWNLOAD:
<a class="attachment" href="/uploads/default/original/2X/d/d5cbf866720c55162f3d5884b11e6fb6685f22a3.kmmacros">Get Selected Text- Title & URL from Web Page.kmmacros</a> (2.6 KB)

---

###ReleaseNotes

HOW TO USE:

1. In Google Chrome web page, select text you want to copy.
2. Trigger this macro
3. Switch you any app that accepts text, and paste.

---

<img src="/uploads/default/original/2X/8/8a46046cd3ce1fe6abdb1c251e5e80283655b410.png" width="467" height="976">
6

Thanks! Already playing around with it.

7

Further question: I’ve got first half of equation done. Extract text into clipboard that is useful to me. Is there a way to send the clipboard contents to a particular “sheet” in Ulysses. I think U. stores files in a package if I’m not mistaken.

8

Sorry, I don't know anything about Ulysses app.

The only thing I could suggest is:

  1. Open Ulysses to the sheet you want.
  2. Do your workflow copying text etc from each web page
  3. At the end of the macro, add:
  • Copy (your selected which is your final text)
  • Activate Ulysses
  • Paste