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.
Just checking in and give a pat on all of your shoulders. Keep up the good works! (Still waiting for a better clipper, though)
Sometimes I do successfully clip contents behind paywall, but not sure what combination of settings (enabling plugins/java/javascript…etc) leads to successful clipping.
If you go to a Quora page and click ‘Continue Reading’ so you can read the full answer, Safari’s File > Export as PDF outputs the page with the answer visible but clipping with DEVONThink’s PDF (One Page) format renders the page with the answer hidden again.
Assuming Safari renders from the page but DEVONThink takes a URL, reloads, and re-renders the page hence the output being the same as the original page load, not as currently rendered in Safari.
I also mostly skip the DT clipper because of unpredictable results and like using Safari’s Export to PDF option. To make this simpler, I use Better Touch Tool to invoke it.
In my effort to archive hundreds of bookmarks to DT in a way that is searchable without going insane I’ve tried a lot of things and encountered most of the problems described in this thread. Here are a few observations:
Clipping to markdown, when it works, is pretty great - super light weight (thanks to linked images) and editable. Also, you can use basic HTML to embed videos. For some workflows this is perfect.
I dream of a perfect, 100% reliable, one-click clip to textbundle that I can highlight like a PDF (in the preview). Until then…
Most of the time I want to have a PDF. For that, I will reiterate the recommendation for the awkwardly named Print Friendly & PDF plugin. In my experience it creates, by far, the best results. Simply activate the plugin, delete any extraneous content (usually little to none present), and save to PDF.
PF-PDF has worked on just about every site I’ve tried. It consistently gives results as readable - often more-so - than the original page.
It is also the only one I’ve found that inserts a thumbnail and web link for embedded YouTube videos.
My biggest problem with capturing to PDF is always that you get paper-oriented artifact that is not easy to read on the phone.
For some unrelated reasons I played lately with clip-to-epub browser extensions (there are many). Captured files were working very well on small kindles and on big almost letter sized tablets. I didn’t have enough time and enthusiasm to try it with DevonThink and DevonThink ToGo, yet that could possibly be a solution. There definitely are more developers working on converting web to whatever-the-popular-ebook-format-is, than on converting to markdown.
Being an old guy, I strongly prefer a paper-like experience. PDFs that look and read like books are my jam. The more technical (graphs, charts, code, etc.) the more this is true for me. After 52 years and 5 eye surgeries I don’t want anything to do with reading PDFs on my phone.
I do, however, wish there was a “one page” option for the PDF output on that plugin. I prefer no page breaks to bad / awkward ones. YMMV
After spending a bit of time on this File > Export PDF > Inbox, as others have mentioned, works best for me. Only minor issue is not having consistent width without introducing scripting, but it’s good enough.
After clipping a lot of pages via ‘Export as PDF’ I’ve just realised the catch: no URL info. If I want this, I’ll have to manually go back through all my clippings and add it
Use Print to PDF / Save PDF to DEVONthink 3 instead for all your further clippings and you get the URL. You can combine it with Safari’s Reader View if that gives you better results.
Sadly that won’t help you with your old clippings.
I can’t remember if at some point there was a bigger change in DEVONthink’s PDF services. Just in case you should re-install the PDF services via Install Add-Ons to get the latest version.
As websites use lots of different techniques and the owner of websites very often have no interest in giving the user a clutter-free i. e. add-free version of their pages I have not found a single perfect solution to capture webpages. I jump back and forth between DEVONthink’s clipper (with or without the clutter-free option) and Print to PDF (sometimes in Reader View sometimes not).
Annoying but what could I do? What makes it a bit easier is that I visit a number of websites regularly and know which method to capture is best for each of them. Until they again change something of course.
