Clip to DEVONthink

I want to clip this article.

The webpage will only show a few paragraphs unless you log in with your paid account.

Suggestion: The Reader View Chrome Web extension works very well. It rivals the Safari Readability functionality for quality, and thatā€™s excellent.

According to the information page for the extension, it implements the open source Readability code for Firefox:

Which is apparently here:

So my suggestion is for DevonThink to implement the same code for its uncluttered view.

Because really I love DevonThink but the uncluttered view is just plain BAD. It doesnā€™t work on at least 50% if the pages I want to clip. I donā€™t even bother with it. Whereas Readability is actually very good.

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Thanks for the suggestion. We will look into this as time allows.

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@korm Thanks! Iā€™m just learning and still not reached the palettes part. Nonetheless, I mimicked your list of actions and placed the trigger also in my Touchbar. This.Will.Save.Me.So.Much.Time! :smile:

Note: I would never think about requesting you to publish all your DT macros. But if you are so inclined one day they would be welcomed, Iā€™m sure. :wink:

I have the same exact problem. I finally reverted to Evernote for clipping and then use Devonā€™s Evernote script to move to DT.

Thanks for the idea, @drcharles! That is indeed a cool idea to use Evernote clipper and then move to DevonThink.

Do you then manually run ā€œImport from Evernoteā€ or use some sort of automation to ā€œnoticeā€ a new clip and import it to Devon?

Can I use the Clip to DEVONthink extension for Safari without running the app like on the previous version?
When I click the extension button, it just opens the app and do nothing, so I have to click the button again to get clipping done.
On the previous version (DEVONthink 2), I didnā€™t need to run the app before do clipping, so I wonder whether itā€™s a bug to fix or a change on the version 3.

No, itā€™s not a bug. DEVONthink needs to be running for the Sorter to be running, which include the integrated Web Clip view.

@BLUEFROG
Thanks!

Iā€™d like to weigh in here.

It seems that the problem with the DT web clipper is precisely that, as ā€˜carnecoā€™ states, ā€œyour clipper does not copy the web content, but only saves a link to the pageā€ [which is then loaded by DT itself], preventing virtually all web pages behind a paywall/login from being captured.

Is there any reason why the DT web clipper canā€™t capture the web content actually being displayed in a browserā€™s tab/window?

If DT is supposed to be the go-to app for saving information, and much information is stored on the web these days (behind logins, I might add), then it would be wonderful if DT could directly capture information behind paywalls/logins.

Lastly, it is my understanding that Apple is moving away from the old Safari extension format and toward Safari extensions that actually reside in the app. Does DT 3 do this?

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Yep. the Clip to DEVONthink Safari App Extension is included with the DT3 app. It only needs to be turned on in Safari Extensions Preferences, no more separate extension to download/install from the deprecated retired Safari Extensions Gallery.

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this Chrome Extension work perfect for meļ¼š

maoxian-web-clipper

opensource in github,support chrome and firefox.

MaoXian Web Clipper is a browser extension to clip information from web page and save it to your local machine to avoid information invalidation.

Thatā€™s it, Not bored registration, Not charged.

Also there is


they have Chrome + FFx extensions and it works really well in making a self contained HTML file. Note file sizes can get really large

Doesnā€™t solve OPā€™s issue, but might be useful as an intermediary step on a case-by-case basis

Thanks for the link to Printfriendly. Tried it and it works very well. I clip from Wikipedia all the time, and the Clip to DT in both Firefox and Chrome is not working very well. Itā€™s a few extra clips with printfriendly, but I really appreciate getting a pdf with clickable links still working!

However, I donā€™t understand your ā€œcustom (Automator) PDF Services workflowā€ and Hazel steps. Can you explain?

Thanks

I started this thread almost a year ago. The fact that it is still active means that the topic is still current and the problem is not solved. Leaving aside the quality of the clipped content, the DT users cannot clip pages behind the paywall/login. Nothing changed with DT 3.x.

I do not understand the arguments of the DT team as ... and also note sites with logins or paywalls can be implemented in a way that makes them difficult to clip from .... What does the browser content conversion have in common with the implementation of the login or paywall mechanism? When I am going to capture a page content, I am already logged in, and the login mechanism is therefore not relevant. All I need is to convert the content between the <body> and </body> tags (e.g. the DOM existing in my browser) into the markdown code and to save the result in DT. Evernote can do it, and Quiver can do it, One Note can do it, many other programs can do it. Not just DT. You donā€™t need to think up the wheel again. Just look at open source projects. For example, Mercury parser extracts only essential HTML code from the page, and Turndown then converts it to markdown. All pure JavaScript. Thatā€™s how the competitors work.

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An extension to my previous post. I played a bit with the DT web clipper trying to capture content from sites that require login. I think I understand, whatā€™s the DT problem. When I launched the Clip to DT action, instead of the page content (as I would expect) the login screen was captured!

IMO the DT clipper just sends the page URL to the DevonThink application and the real parsing/capturing of the page occurs later in the app. And the app must go through the login process again because from the server point of view it is a new session. Even launching Clip to DT in the internal DT browser does not work! Your HTML to Markdown converter starts from scratch ignoring the existing session.

If it is so, and I am pretty sure it is, than I must say itā€™s totally wrong solution. No wonder that it does not work. Until you parse the page content directly in the browser using JavaScript and send the converted result as the markdown document to the DT via an API, you have no chance to create a good clipper.

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Web clipping in my usage of DT so far is one of its weakest points. Iā€™m constantly having to check whether pages clipped properly and retrying with different workflows or formats. As well, DTTG has similar but different issues which I have to keep track of depending on whether Iā€™m capturing on my phone or my laptop. Itā€™s a real PITA for smooth knowledge capture. It being so unreliable and buggy feels out of character for what is otherwise an incredible piece of software.

Iā€™m very hopeful that future versions of DT will find a way to capture whatā€™s rendered in the browser rather than sending the link to DT to parse, and barring that, some kind of reliable method for replicating whatā€™s already working properly in our browsers.

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I gave DT 3 a run because I am wanting to get away from evernote but I heavily use the web clipper. I am constantly clipping snippets of text and other selections from rendered webpages. In Safari this works but in Firefox and Chrome is does not. Using the extensions they just send the whole URL to DT. Using the ā€œselectionā€ bookmarklet clips the text but none of the media selected.

Unfortunately I cannot use DT until the web clipping is up to par with evernote. You may be a smaller company but I donā€™t see how its so difficult just reading rendered code. This should be a high priority as today most of our information comes from web pages. I rarely need to clip the whole thing and all the cruft that comes with it, I just want some blurbs here and there. I am not willing to change my entire workflow to safari just to use DT.

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I agree with the thread. The Web Clipper is the only part of Evernote that I miss. My current needs are not very critical so I can live with the current situation (mostly), but an improvement would be nice.

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