# Can you save a whole SD thread to your hard drive? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 11, 2006, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962 "2006-07-11T03:00:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/1 "2006-07-11T03:00:00Z")
I’d like to save the text to Word, possibly. Just something that doesn’t link back to SD and need a internet connection to access. Is there a neat way to do this? By the way, I have a Mac and use Safari. Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![Rico](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rico/32/3582_2.png) [@Rico](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rico)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/2 "2006-07-11T03:06:51Z")
Up top, see the menu marked “Thread Tools?” Click it and you should see “Show Printable Version.” Cut and paste to Word. That what you need? ---
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 3:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/3 "2006-07-11T03:53:56Z")
> [@Rico](#): > > Up top, see the menu marked “Thread Tools?” Click it and you should see “Show Printable Version.” Cut and paste to Word. > > That what you need? I just tried it. Very helpful, but I still have to copy and paste one page at a time. Is there any way around that? ---
**Author:** ![Rico](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rico/32/3582_2.png) [@Rico](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rico)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 4:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/4 "2006-07-11T04:22:07Z")
I just tried a bunch of things and it looks like the best you’re gonna do is 50 posts per page. Probably a vBulletin limitation or something. To get the 50 posts per page, look in the top right of the printable page. I believe that’s the limit. ---
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/5 "2006-07-11T04:49:17Z")
> [@Rico](#): > > I just tried a bunch of things and it looks like the best you’re gonna do is 50 posts per page. Probably a vBulletin limitation or something. > > To get the 50 posts per page, look in the top right of the printable page. > > I believe that’s the limit. Okay. Thanks a lot. ---
**Author:** ![coffeecat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/coffeecat/32/3405_2.png) [@coffeecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coffeecat)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/6 "2006-07-11T15:55:10Z")
Try [wget](http://www.pure-mac.com/offline.html#wget). ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Slant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c57346/32.png) [@Mr.Slant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Slant)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/7 "2006-07-11T16:32:11Z")
If you don’t know this already, you can make much smaller files in plain text than by copying and pasting a web site into WORD, which also takes a while due to processing needs. I like to COPY the web page and PASTE it into NOTEPAD, then SELECT ALL in NOTEPAD and PASTE into WORD. Strips out anything fancy… ---
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/8 "2006-07-11T17:50:13Z")
> [@coffeecat](#): > > Try [wget](http://www.pure-mac.com/offline.html#wget). I download it and wanted to make sure it was MAc-compatible. Couldn’t find anything on the home page, so I didn’t install. Also, I couldn’t figure out how to downoad it. when I unzipped the file I got all kinds of folders and documents. Do you know if it’s Mac compatible? ---
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/9 "2006-07-11T17:56:10Z")
> [@Mr. Slant](#): > > If you don’t know this already, you can make much smaller files in plain text than by copying and pasting a web site into WORD, which also takes a while due to processing needs. > I like to COPY the web page and PASTE it into NOTEPAD, then SELECT ALL in NOTEPAD and PASTE into WORD. Strips out anything fancy… Arrrgghhhh. Idon’t have Notepad, so I tried Stickies. No luck. I then tried Text Edit. And much to my surprise, the best results are obtained when simply copying the and pasting the normal SD page. The only problem is that if I shrink the window then expand, any portion that was visibly narrowed (that portion of the page which I could see), staye shrunk after I expanded the page again. Make that the portion that appeared in the quote box. But even when I copy and paste from here into Word it won’t work. The text is quite large and extends well off the page, only letting me see about 60%. ---
**Author:** ![FlyingCowOfDoom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/flyingcowofdoom/32/21776_2.png) [@FlyingCowOfDoom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyingCowOfDoom)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/10 "2006-07-11T19:14:46Z")
You can also use Edit/Paste Special in Word. Click “Unformatted Text” in the dialog that appears. –FCOD ---
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/11 "2006-07-11T20:16:52Z")
You could look your thread up in the archive. You lose formatting, but it looks like you get 200 posts per page. The 41-page LOTR thread gets condensed to 9: [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-138905-p-9.html](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-138905-p-9.html) If you were using Firefox, there’s an extension for repagination: [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2099/](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2099/) I think you need a separate extension to save the concatenated pages. ---
**Author:** ![coffeecat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/coffeecat/32/3405_2.png) [@coffeecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coffeecat)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2006, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-you-save-a-whole-sd-thread-to-your-hard-drive/363962/12 "2006-07-11T20:38:13Z")
> [@magellan01](#): > > I download it and wanted to make sure it was MAc-compatible. Couldn’t find anything on the home page, so I didn’t install. Also, I couldn’t figure out how to downoad it. when I unzipped the file I got all kinds of folders and documents. Do you know if it’s Mac compatible? It’s supposed to be, if you have OS X. Apparently that link is to the source code, and all the stuff you got when you unzipped is documentation, as well as stuff you’re supposed to compile to get the actual program. [Here’s wget](http://www.statusq.org/images/wget.zip) already compiled for OS X 10.3, in a zip file. The README.txt that’s included in the zip will tell you where to copy things to to get it to work. If you’re not running OS X, feel free to ignore me. 😉