This PM shareware utility strips HTML codes from Web pages, leaving only the text and URLs (optionally). Some of the page's formatting is retained, but since PMStripper is not an HTML interpreter most formatting is lost. While the layout of tables and lists is lost during stripping, data is sorted to separate lines for legibility.
PMStripper is designed to provide a quick conversion of HTML coded files into plain ASCII text. Although the converted files can be edited while loaded in PMStripper, only simple edit commands are available. Therefore, if extensive editing is needed, the text should be loaded into a more capable word processor or text editor.
The registered version offers a menu item to easily move stripped files to programs suited for advanced editing.
A convenient way to use PMStripper is to install it as the raw HTML viewer in the IBM Web Explorer. This makes it easier to save information from Web pages or cut and paste URLs from Web pages. PMStripper may also be installed as the document source viewer in Netscape.
PMStripper is a shareware program and if you continue to use the program you should register it. PMStripper does not have any code to check on how long the program has been in use, so it is up to the user to determine a reasonable trial period.
The shareware version of PMStripper is fully functional, some of the convenience features are disabled but they do not effect the function of the utility. Trying the disabled features will bring up an unregistered message requiring a user response.
This utility will only run on OS/2 Warp and later releases.
One useful feature is the ability to mark text in the stripped file and use the highlighted text as the file's 'Save As' name. This is very useful if you have HPFS formatted drives. NOTE: Spaces and some punctuation characters are converted to "_" characters in the file name unless the option to use spaces is selected. Then any converted characters are converted to spaces. The "/" and "\" characters are deleted and not replaced. This feature is only activated in the registered version of PMStripper.
The HTML specification defines "Character Entity Sets" or tags to represent particular graphic characters which have special meanings in the markup language, or may not be part of the character set available to the writer. PMStripper does not scan for all possible tags, but does try to resolve the most common.
PMStripper has support for code pages 437 and 850 and if code page 850 is in use, the 850 character set is used. The code pages only make a difference when &xxxx; tags are present in the file If the correct character or an acceptable alternate is not available a space character is used. If the tag is unknown to PMStripper, then the &xxxx; tag will be left in the file.
Registered users of PMStripper will have access to two additional executable files that were compiled with the 486 and 586 compiler options. These versions will offer some performance improvement for users with 468 , Pentium, or equivalent CPUs.