While moving to DT from Evernote I am really missing one feature - the working Web Clipper. I must say I never understood how the Clip to DEVONthink works. IMO clipping Web Archive creates only a bookmark in DT. If I clip a page that requires a login and then I try to open the document later, DT browser opens the login form first. The web page is not saved as ‘materialized’.
I tried to clip only a selection using the bookmarklet. That works (all other bookmarklets are in my opinion a joke and I never got them working as expected), but the document is created as a Plain Text file while I need is as the Markdown file. Unfortunately, I did not found a way how to change the document type from plain text to markdown.
Because the search for information on the Internet is my daily business, not working Clip to DEVONthink is a real problem for me. Any idea?
You can’t change the document file type when clipping selected text.
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, we have it on our list to enhance in the future. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
(Also, note that Evernote has 300+ 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.)
The clipping extension will be updated as time allows, but we currently have some very high priority projects in progress.
I think you did not understand my problem. I am not going to compare the Evernote with DT and I understand your resource limitation. However, my concern is, that your clipper does not copy the web content, but only saves a link to the page. When I return to such a clipped page after years, maybe the web page does not exist anymore or, when the access is protected by a password, I do not know the password.
The Web Archive format is the most fragile one due to its design (e.g. dynamic websites might require different resources each time they’re viewed), other formats (e.g. PDF or formatted notes) are recommended for long-term archiving.
@carnecro: If there is a problem clipping a page, a Bookmark is clipped as a fallback measure (so at least you could revisit the page). If you haven’t recently, I suggest rebooting your machine and trying the clipping again.
And also note sites with logins or paywalls can be implemented in a way that makes them difficult to clip from. Per-application cookies are not shared between apps in macOS for some time now, so you may want to try accessing such a site in DEVONthink and doing the clipping there. It’s not guaranteed to work, but it does work with some sites.
that will probably not be exactly your need, but i usually help myself with clipping as pdf or saving the website in the browser as »web archive« (and importing that file in dt).
Hey, there is a bookmarklet that can copy something from web to devonthink?!
Awesome! I have pretty much given up auto-copying info from web and now there’s hope again!
Where do you get the bookmarklet from? I failed to locate instructions for it in the apps preferences.
Capturing web content to a PDF then imported/indexed into DEVONthink was a critical interest of mine when I first migrated from Evernote to DTP. After toying around with the DT-built Web Clipper (Add to DT) and having moderate success, I continued to explore with other tools that might integrate well and have a better average in the web>pdf>DTP process. While I still do use the web clipper for bookmarks, for most of my web captures I use the (free) cloud-based service ‘printfriendly’. It is very fast, accurate and flexible to clean up a web page and present the (mostly text) form from which to save as a PDF. It is worth checking out. It is better than even Evernote’s own.
Once I have the web page ready to convert to PDF, I use a custom (Automator) PDF Services workflow item to move the PDF to a local folder, where I use Hazel for any renaming and/or tagging before importing/indexing into DTP. Since the PDF services can be assigned a shortcut, the process from web to PDF to DTP is a few keystrokes and a few seconds.
It would be cool if DT were able to provide a similar cloud engine to do the same thing as Printfriendly as an integral part of DT. Even ‘as is’ though, I am in love with DT and hope it lasts (at least) as long as I do. Thanks for such a fantastic product, and the great support that you provide!
@tatomu Thanks for the link to printfriendly. It is indeed an interesting service. But it doesn’t seem to work well with multi-page articles; you have to clip each one separately.
And why not just use the Reader view in Safari, save to PDF, import to DevonThink, and bob’s your uncle you’re done?
I’m experimenting with clipping to Evernote first, then importing from Evernote to DevonThink. It seems to work OK but ask me again in a month.
I’ve long used a KeyboardMaestro macro that puts Safari into Reader mode, invokes Print and causes Print to save as PDF to DEVONthink, then takes Safari back out of Reader mode.
In DEVONthink, I have the “Import” option configured as Destination > Select Group so that DEVONthink asks each time where I want the PDF stored.
I do this because the DEVONthink clipper’s clutter-free PDF is not consistently as good as Safari reader mode. For the kind of pages I clip, of course. YMMV
I also have the problem saving a webpage behind paywalls.
I tried to browse the webpage in DT and clip it in DT, but the formatted note or web archive I get is still not what I see in the DT after I logged in.
It seems that even if I clip the webpage in the DT (by right-click in the viewer or click the gear icon in the top-left corner), DT still tries to download it from URL instead of saving the downloaded resources in the DT viewer.
I have a series of palettes (see KM documentation) for different apps. All the palettes are invoked with the same shortcut: ^\ . Since the palette is assigned only to one app, I only see the relevant macros for, e.g., Safari when I invoke that shortcut while Safari is the frontmost application.
The macro below belongs to the Safari palette.
Within the macro, the keystroke ⌘P is invoked twice in succession, with a pause between. The first invocation of ⌘P opens the Print dialog. The second invocation of ⌘P cause the command Print > PDF > Save PDF to DEVONthink 3 to be invoked.
There is a setup required to make this work. In System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts assign ⌘P in the “All Applications” category to “Save PDF to DEVONthink 3”.
Here is the macro. (No, I will not publish all of my DEVONthink macros – too much work )
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