Internet Recipe Hunting and Recipe Reformatting Tips

A Tutorial in Three Parts - Part II: Take a Shortcut with MS Word

By Harry {doc} Babad and edited by Julie M. Willingham

For this article I’ll be working with three of the eight web pages from Darlene Schmidt’s Easy Thai Green Curry Chicken recipe found at: http://thaifood.about.com/od/thairecipes/ss/greencurry.htm.

To use MS Word for capturing the contents of a Web recipe, you work directly from the web page(s) itself. There is no need to download the recipe as a PDF or HTML file. The objective is to create a good-looking recipe for your files from a recipe posted on the Web. This is so simple that most of you could make it work in a few minutes, but I’d hate to neglect those of you who prefer a bit of guidance.

To Capture Part of A Recipe, Drag It — Create a new MS Word document, then highlight the first part of the recipe you want to capture. Move the highlighted part to your new Word document, using drag-and-drop or cut-and-paste. [Save – Save – Save—Often!] This will give you either text or an image, despite having highlighted both. If you get text in your first drag, capture the image next. Repeat this as often as necessary to get what you want into the Word document. If you want the recipe origin, don’t forget to copy the link for the site – I paste it under the recipe title as a live link.

Formatting 101:Donot format pieces as you grab them. It’s more work than formatting the new document all at once when you’re done. Convert the entire document into the font and size you want for the body of the recipe. [I like Lucinda Grande 12, but it’s your nickel.] You can always pretty up the header later.

Ingredient Lists — Often the ingredient list, a when dragged to a MS Word document, appears as a formal bulleted list. By using Word’s Bullets and Numbering feature, you can convert the list-formatted ingredients to unnumbered and non-bulleted text.

Line Spacing — Some recipes, or parts of recipes, import with large 12-16 point spacing after a line of text, but it’s easy to correct this problem. Use the MS Word Format Paragraph feature on the whole document. This allows you to remove the unneeded text spacing. You can always add an extra paragraph where you need more white space.

Pictures to Move and Resize — Now you can click on an image in your document to both resize it and to move it. MS Word also allows you, with the text-wrapping tool, to make the image a part of a paragraph, tying the words and image closer together. The tools you’ll need are found on Word’s Drawing Toolbar. When I reduced the image sizes, an eight-page recipe fit onto four pages. Which image size or recipe length pleases you better depends on your sense of esthetics. Traditionally, folks try to keep a recipe on one page; but my eyes are too old for that kind of constraint.

Final Touches — You can now tweak the title, by making it bold, or alter the paragraph structure to create a more attractive spacing. It’s your document design, so please yourself. For example, you can change the font of a discussion of background to set off that material. Most of the time I don’t bother with multiple fonts, since I want the essence of the recipe, not a copy of its design as displayed on the website.

Other Thoughts — MS Word has a powerful macro feature that can allow you to do most of the detailed formatting of the entire document automatically. Since I have neither the knowledge of how to script or work with MS Word’s Basic editor, I must create my macro(s) by simply recording the steps. Mostly this works… but occasionally I have to change the step sequences to tune up the macro. Try it! The steps that can be integrated into a single macro for a general reformatting of a recipe in MSW include:

ü     Adjusting the body font

ü     Removing extra paragraph specific line spacing

ü     Reverting lists, artificially created by dragging ingredient lists to MSW, to plain paragraph text format

What a macro can’t do is to take a paragraph formatted set of ingredients and turn it into a more traditional list of ingredients. You must do that that hard way by inserting paragraphs breaks after each item you cooking with.

So remember, there is one weakness to using MS Word to capture recipes by drag-and-drop: You destroy both the layout created by the folks who posted the recipe, and likely will not be able to capture any subtle font design-related features that make parts of a recipe eye-catching.

MS Word to PDF — Finally, if you prefer, you can convert the Word document to a PDF, either by using Acrobat’s plug-in modules or by using Apple’s OS X Print to PDF. Doing the latter does not shrink the file size, however.

Working With Huge Blog Sites

Fortunately, most single recipes are small enough to rework as mentioned above. But sometimes while recipe hunting, I find a treasure trove of goodies in a multipage single link blog. What follows are my thoughts on dealing with such a site.

As I browsed for an image for an Oriental dish, I came across a blog containing wonderful recipes, pictures of recipes, and tales of restaurants and cooking adventures. I became instantly envious, but that is another story.

I did want to capture some of these goodies for future use. See: http://www.stefmike.org/mt-archives/cat_culinary.html/. At first, I merely skimmed this eye catching and well-designed site. It was 342 pages long when printed as a PDF – a very long scroll in Safari. There were hundreds of wonderful, mostly Oriental, food-related items that a normal search would not likely turn up. [A comparably site: check out http://www.femalebridesonline.com/.

As an experiment, I downloaded the entire PDF - NOT recommended - just to check its size: it topped out at 11 MB. Surprisingly, when I used Acrobat to capture it as Website to PDF, the file was only 10.7 MB, despite retaining its active links. (I kept the level of linking to only one level, otherwise the file gets bloated.) I found attempting to work with the huge PDF, using my normal method of recipe capture [See Part III], both cumbersome and time consuming, so I decided to work using MS Word instead.

So if the recipes you want to capture are contained in a long blog, you can be more selective about material you want to retain by copying desired text and images, one piece at a time, into individual MS Word documents. Just create one document for each recipe or food-related subject.

I find that a focused drag-and-drop into MS Word is a great way to easily capture a “run-on” blog. Although this approach appears to be to be more work, believe me, it’s not. It’s easy to either copy/paste or grab individual pieces from many parts of the blog to use as additional background for recipe itself. It does take serious work if the target is hundreds of pages long, but is well worth the trouble if you’re either picky or just like fooling around. Anyway, it’s a great way to collect recipes while tuning into to your favorite music and enjoying coffee in the evening, which you couldn’t normally justify.

Why Use Only Selective Drag and Drop

Other than that it’s usually less work, the main reason I like dragging, or pasting, recipes (and reformatting them) in MS Word is that I can keep the recipe’s source-related links and hyperlinks if I desire.

“Other than that it’s usually less work, the main reason I like dragging recipes (and reformatting them) in MS Word is that the recipe’s source-related links and hyperlinks stay intact. I like keeping some links, especially those to the source URL or to background information I want in the recipe. If I don’t need a link, I can always break it using Word’s Create Hyperlink function.”

In Closing

At any rate, there are indeed several ways to make recipes you capture on the web pretty as you collect them. Dragging to MS Word is easy; tweaking PDF files (Part III) is more of a challenge, but maintains the site’s original formatting and style. Practice on one of the sites I’ve shared in Part I, or pick your own poison. Whatever you do, enjoy!

Remember most of the material you’ve captured has been copyright protected, but the fair-use clause allows you personal use.