It’s actually logged to Windows > Log which is automatically shown if the option wasn’t disabled.
Yes – apologies for not realising that this only happens when the captured format isn’t what was asked for. I find that a bit cryptic, but I think your answer will always be Read The Fine Log, so I’ll live with that 
Turn on notifications for DT. The notification will tell you if it saved a bookmark or the desired format. If a bookmark, I immediately re-clip.
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Another vote in favor of a longer wait or an error message in favor for reliability in getting a PDF and not a bookmark.
In my case the issue had been triggered by Substack post pages, and always resolves on second clipping, a minute later.
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How fast and reliable is your network? The timeout is actually 60 seconds since the last time data was received. But of course this might be also caused by the remote side, e.g. dropped connections.
I’ve been a DT user for the past four years and this has always been a frustration of mine. I check the forums occasionally to see if there’s been a resolution and it seems like there never will be. Thanks @winsome for the recommendation of Print Friendly. It seems to do the job better than I was expecting.
FWIW, the last page I tried to capture was a page from Atlassian’s blog. From what I know of them, I am betting their pages run pretty lean. Total load time was <400ms. Same result as always when requesting a PDF saved to DT: a bookmark first and then a PDF on the second request.
I understand that things are complicated and we don’t always get what we want or expect. The unsettling thing here is how DT behaves by reliably (for me) always doing a different thing than I asked when saving to PDF. It’s like a tiny splinter in my confidence around the overall system. It makes me wonder what else might be going wrong that I’m not seeing. As suggested above, a failure message and explanation of the fallback would do wonders for the user experience and confidence in the reliability of the program.
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Welcome @bradsukala
The unsettling thing here is how DT behaves by reliably (for me) always doing a different thing than I asked when saving to PDF.
Clarify this statement, e.g., always. Are you saying you never can clip a PDF from online?
No. It always clips a bookmark first when I ask for a PDF, and then a PDF on the second attempt.
- From what browser?
- On what OS?
- On a local or public network?
- And does it persist after rebooting the device?
Well, Work Life by Atlassian - Unleashing the potential of all teams with tips, tools, and practices throws a JavaScript and two CORS violations. Lighthouse reports 84 performance points (of 100 possible ones – not a good score for a large company). They’re delivering 2 MB of images in old formats (ie not WebP) and the Largest Contentful Paint takes 2 seconds. In addition, they use ridiculously short TTLs for some of their cached resources.
Not what I’d call “lean”, but YMMV.
OTOH, I have no trouble saving that page as PDF to DT (paginated, using Firefox 128 on macOS 14.5).
- I see the issue in both Arc (currently using this) and Safari (before I switched)
- macOS 14.5 (23F79)
- Not sure how to answer this. It’s on my home network, but I’m connecting to the internet, so it’s not my local network. Don’t really know if it happens while I’m out and about.
- Yeah, it works as expected after a reboot. I confirmed that just now and tried it in the past based on your other posts. It just seems to stop working as expected as some unknown point.
This was my test page: Working hybrid? You need team agreements - Work Life by Atlassian
I wasn’t allowed to post links in my first post, I guess because my account was new.
Your home network is indeed a factor in the equation. In addition to the intevening network between you and the remote server. Also, if you’re on WiFi, add an additional dose of variability.
via Neo Network Utility… and still going.
While this doesn’t mean there will always be a failure, it helps illustrate the distance between your machine and a remote server.
Thanks for the insights. At this point, I am happy with what the Print Friendly extension is doing.
More than anything just sharing that here for others with similar frustrations. I’ve found it to be a surprisingly pleasantly fallback.
You’re welcome.