The Capture Window feature in the sorter is a convenient means to capture content either from a browser or from other apps. However it only captures the currently displayed content.
Is there any way this could include an auto-scroll feature so it it would capture the entire Window contents? That would immensely add to its utility.
No, this is not currently possible and an example URL and content would be helpful.
A frequent example would be capturing all the content in a popup window in in Outlook Web App containing a specific email message.
Actually the latest releases already try to automatically scroll dynamic pages but this might be not compatible to every webpage (and some dynamic pages are actually endless).
Could you give me an example of a page where this works currently? I do not see that behavior on any site I have tried with either Chrome or Safari.
Actually URLs received from users. Any URL to reproduce the issue would be useful.
My fault, I’m sorry - I was referring to clipping, not taking screenshots.
Any chance the screenshots could scroll?
Why are you taking screen captures of web content instead of merely clipping them?
@rkaplan you could capture the PDF of a webpage (see various scripts I’ve posted here such as Automatically capture and annotate items (to use with Obsidian)) and convert the PDF into an image if you’d like. For what you want I would use PDF anyway because it has the added benefit of the text layer. But e.g. with your Outlook e-mails why not just import them as .eml to DT?
If you want a good screenshot tool that does what you want (+more like OCR, create GIFs etc) take a look at Cleanshot X
@BLUEFROG and @mdbraber - Thank you both for the suggestions
The reason I am trying screen captures is that the DT3 web clipper does not work at all on Outlook OWA. Due to either security or complexity of the site, the best I wind up with is a bookmark to the email but it will not download the actual email content.
Cleanshot X can create a screenshot, but its scrolling feature is not very good and often results in distortion of the email.
The reason I am not just importing them as .eml files is that I prefer webmail over local Apple Mail so I do not need to worry about syncing my laptop regularly. If I were to use Mac Mail on my laptop and I do not travel for a couple weeks, then it takes a while to bring Mac Mail up to date and if I do not do that from home, the bandwidth in a hotel may be unrealistic to get it back in sync.
I am forever trying to perfect the best way to import email - including this script which I use to import a full email including attachments via webmail The Ultimate Email Import Script or Mac Mail import when I am at a computer that has my full email synced to it.
But in the case of an email message with no file attachments, it would be nice to be able to clip a screenshot of the email from web to Devonthink.
I supposed I am obsessed with optimizing the workflow for email import to DT3 because I probably do this a couple dozen times every day.
In the end it seems that Outlook OWA does not “play nice” with regard to automation. Tricks that work on almost any other site do not work there.
Clipping OWA sounds horrible. Although an edit to my own answer: you can just clip any content in a browser window to PDF rather decent, without need ‘support’ of the website, check the first script in this series: Automatically capture and annotate items (to use with Obsidian)
My idea was that you’d also be able to export a single mail from Outlook to DT3 - but I understand you don’t use any of the desktop mail clients, right? Just OWA? I use Fastmail, there’s an option to export the ‘raw’ e-mail, which is the exact same as an eml file - maybe there’s a similar option in OWA?
I import 100% of my e-mail and have written several AppleScript/Python scripts. They do use IMAP directly though, so it might not be what you’re looking for. But in case you’re interested: Auto-import new mail to DEVONthink (I haven’t published recent updates I’ve done to the script though)
Very few mail web clients play nice. I believe Fastmail is an exception which offers a rather decent JS framework (Ouverture) to script (although with some challenges of its own)
Absolutely agree and they’re not built for automation with non-web tech.
@mdbraber Those are very interesting - many thanks. Clearly a huge amount of work for you to get those set up.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think the “Automatically capture and annotate” items scripts will work because an individual OWA message is displayed as a popup window with no direct URL. It seems to me those scripts require a direct URL to the content to be clipped- correct?
The IMAP script is intriguing as a concept but what I want to do is to be able to bring up the DT3 group selector so I can file each email in the group for the applicable case/client I am working on.
Thus I think the export raw email feature of Fastmail may be most interesting of all. Does the raw email export truly export an .eml file that you can open with Outlook or Apple Mail? How does it handle file attachments?
I’ve got no knowledge about OWA, but ‘under the hood’ it’s like that the window is still referring to a (direct) URL, only it’s hiding it from the user. You could try to do some digging. E.g. where do clicks on messages in the message list point to, what’s in ‘view source’ et etc.
“An e-mail” is basically nothing more than text (these days quite often with large base64 encoded chunks which are the attachments). That text consists of headers (From: John Doe <john@doe.com> etc) and content. All that text is what basically makes up the .eml file, so you could say it’s not really an export, but just a 1:1 copy. Most often it’s what you see in e-mail clients if you select something like ‘View source’. E.g. in Apple Mail you can select a message and go to View > Message > Raw Source.
Did you try scrolling capture with Snagit? It can capture an entire page as an image and export it (as pdf), also directly to DT’s inbox, too.
Yes I tried that with Snagit
Automatic Scrolling Capture does not work on any OWA page.
Manual Scrolling is very hard to do - even when I scrolled very slowly, I wound up with missing or mis-aligned parts of the image.
Just curious but is a single page PDF captured by DEVONthink or exported by Safari looking as expected?
