Clip selection from Safari as PDF?

If I use the Sorter’s “Capture Content from Safari” to create a PDF, I get a PDF of the whole web page. This includes a lot of noise in sidebars, headers and so on.

If I use the “Copy Selection” hotkey, I get the selected area, but I only have a choice of plain text, rich text, formatted note, or Markdown. None of these capture the formatting correctly on the pages I’m using them with.

Is there a way to capture the selection as a PDF, so that the exact formatting is preserved? If not, would it be possible to add this?

Have you tried using the clutter free option when capturing a web page to a PDF? This will capture just the content similar to Safari’s reader mode.

Yes (sorry, forgot to mention that)

Unfortunately, it treats tables as clutter and reformats them:

Summer Opening |Times
From 1st April 2019 to 30th September 2019 |
Opening Time
|
Closing Time
|
| Monday | 09:00 | 18:00 |
| Tuesday | 09:00 | 18:00 |
| Wednesday | 09:00 | 18:00 |
| Thursday | 09:00 | 18:00 |
| Friday | 09:00 | 18:00 |
| Saturday | 09:00 | 18:00 |
| Sunday | 09:00 | 18:00 |

It’s readable, but I’d really rather have the fully-formatted main section of the page without the headers and sidebars… or, at least, have tables rendered as the original HTML tables rather than being converted into ASCII art.

To me, “remove clutter” means “keep formatting but lose navigation, ads, sidebars, headers and footers”, which isn’t what the clipper does. I’d be happier just selecting the bit I want to keep and having it ignore the rest (which is probably easier to implement than an algorithm to work out which bits to keep and which to discard :slight_smile: )

The page I’m testing on is ‎http://www.recycleforwestsussex.org/recycling-sites/westhampnett/— and this isn’t the most annoying and distracting of sidebars, but it’s still too much for me at times, especially the giant distracting image at the top of the right sidebar.

I haven’t used Evernote for some years, but ISTR their web clipper used to allow this — it was running from within a Safari extension, though.

Safari reader mode, ⌘-P, select Save PDF to Devonthink 3 may work.

Closest yet — but it pagniates. If there was a way to save that as a single long page without the print headers and footers, it would be better. It still loses the original formatting, though.

Since the clipper effectively loads the page itself rather than grabbing what’s in Safari, I can’t even use the DOM inspector or an ad blocker to remove the offending elements before clipping.

I’d much rather the clipper grabbed the stuff directly from Safari, as then I know it’s gone through Ghostery, uBlock Origin etc and hasn’t connected to all sorts of trackers that I’ve already blocked. The “Block advertisements” checkbox is pretty opaque — I’d much rather it could use the configuration I’ve already set in the browser.

OK, how about using share sheet, Add to Devonthink, in Format select PDF (One page)

No good, I’m afraid — it still loads the whole page from scratch, and ignores the selection. Anything I’ve deleted in the DOM inspector is still there.

Is this what you’re after?

Untitled.pdf (68.5 KB)

On Safari 12.1.2, I used Reader View. Then print to pdf.

Almost. When I use the clipper, I select “PDF (One Page)”, not “PDF (Paginated)”. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get “print to PDF” to treat the page length as infinite.

I’ve saved the full page and cropped it in Preview to show the sort of thing I’m after — original formatting preserved, but only the selected area clipped, and all processing done by Safari plugins (adblockers, etc) preserved. TEST copy.pdf (534.9 KB)

https://evernote.com/features/webclipper shows the Evernote clipper allows selection (though I’m not sure what it does with browser plugins). However, I’d rather not use the hack of clipping to Evernote and then trying to get a PDF out of there, especially since I don’t want to sign up for an account and have them continually badger me in-app to upgrade to a paid account (which is the main reason I dropped Evernote in the first place!)

My ideal workflow would be for the clipper to use the logic “if there is a selection in Safari, clip only that part — otherwise clip the whole page” — and for it to render only what is visible in Safari after the plugins have altered the page, rather than downloading its own copy and working from there. I suspect that means doing the heavy lifting in a browser plugin rather than a menubar app, though.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to get “print to PDF” to treat the page length as infinite.

That is correct as the concept of printing involves page sizes, very defined ones.

Full Website Screenshot - Save web pages, articles, and PDFs shows the Evernote clipper allows selection (though I’m not sure what it does with browser plugins).

Note: Due to the ever-changing technologies employed by web designers, not all pages can be successfully clipped. (And yes, even Evernote’s clipping extension fails at times.) You could browse the page in DEVONthink and clip it from there. This may have a better chance of capturing those problematic pages.

Note: There is no “clipping standard”. These things are developed independently and with their own solutions. Though our extension works in many instances, it will be updated as time allows, but we currently have some very high priority projects in progress.Thanks for your patience and understanding.

(Also, note that Evernote has ~500+ employees and millions of dollars in funding. We are a small development house, completely self-contained and funded through our sales alone. And at one point, I heard rumor (though I didn’t try and substantiate it) they had at least 40 people working on the clipping extension technology.)

I did find myself wondering this morning if it was possible to create a fake printer that claimed to have paper on a continuous roll — I think my Brother label printer supports this, though the width would obviously be a bit small for this use case!

Evernote may have many people working on the clipper, but they seem to have been caught on the hop by Apple’s disabling the Safari Extension Gallery and redirecting to the App Store, as they haven’t put the clipper up there yet :smiley: Looks like Safari is going to have to go in the bin, as some key extensions I require aren’t available in the App Store, and the devs have said they’re not going to pay $99/year just to put them there.

(Actually, I’ve just looked a bit closer at Vivaldi, and its “print to PDF” has a “selection only” option, so if I can find a printer definition that allows A4-width continuous roll paper, then that should solve all my problems with a quick Keyboard Maestro macro…)

Add me to the list of people who are interested in this.

i tend to use the DT3 clipper from Chrome mostly, sometimes Safari. I nearly always clip to un-paginated PDF. For me, the annoyance is insertion of ads by the DT3 clipper.

My wish is for a way to install a popular ad-blocker (e.g. uBlock Origin) into DT3. Ideally that would be invoked by the clipper and by the web browser.

Given Safari 13’s move to extensions only being available through the App Store, and uBlock Origin not being ported across, I suspect the best way for the clipper to do this would be to use the Chrome or Firefox versions.

I’ve switched my main browser to Vivaldi as Safari can no longer meet my needs without uBlock Origin, Ghostery (non-lite) and Camelizer, but still haven’t found an ideal clipping solution (as saving to PDF insists on paginating things, often without much regard to where a page break falls). So giving the clipper the ability to use Chrome or Firefox plugins would be ideal for me — but I suspect rather too much dev work is required for that to be a possibility :cry:

Have you tried Maiar?
I’ve been using it as my default for a few months now and really like it.

Looks good at first — shame it doesn’t let you remap key bindings, though. But having an icon that doesn’t look similar to RubyMine’s is going to save a bit of hassle :grin:

It’s faster than other browsers in my experience. Does a nice job with privacy too.