Clipping PDF will cause the problem of blank end

DEVONthink
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1

Need help! Clipping PDF will cause the problem of blank end.

Screen Shot 2022-11-05 at 19.22.11
Screen Shot 2022-11-05 at 19.22.111920Ă—1084 148 KB

The same page, on the left is a PDF I clipped in May, and on the right is a PDF I clipped now.(Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics)

Clipped six months ago.pdf (123.1 KB)
Clipped now.pdf (148.9 KB)

The comparison shows that the clipped PDF now generates a certain amount of blank space at the end of the PDF. Is it a DevonThink update error?

I try multiple pages for clipping and they all cause this problem. What is the best way to solve it?

DevonThink3.8.6
MacOS Monterey 12.6.1
M1 Macbook Air
Browser: Safari & Arc

Thanks!

2

Why is that a problem?

1 Like
3

Just tried this via the bookmarklets in Edge as well as directly via DT3 (3.8.6) with Chrome and Safari (PDF as well as PDF Paginated) and did not get that result. (macOS 13.0)

4

As you can see, this creates a lot of white space at the end of the PDF.

I don’t think most people will like it. And, if I merge multiple PDFs like this into one PDF, it doesn’t read well. :melting_face:

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5

Thank you for sharing your experiment.:blush: I am still trying to find the root cause of the problem.

6

PDF is a page-oriented print format. If there’s nothing to print, you’ll get white space. That’s just how it is. The only possibility to prevent that, afaik, would be to set a custom page format that is smaller than the other pages in this clip. In my opinion, that’s even less desirable.

But I suspect that there might be something weird going on, so perhaps you could post the URL of the page you’re trying to clip.

1 Like
8

Thank you for your reply.

Maybe it has nothing to do with printing? Because I’m using full pages, not pagination.

The following two documents are the same clipping collection of web pages, respectively, six months ago and the current creation, you can see that the current creation of the end of the PDF has a large number of redundant blank.

Clipped six months ago.pdf (123.1 KB)
Clipped now.pdf (148.9 KB)

9

:wink: It always has to do with printing because that’s where PDF is coming from: printers. One of the central concepts is that of a white page of fixed dimensions, on which visible marks are left.

  • which versions of DT and macOS are you using?
  • on which hardware (Intel or Apple CPU)?

I can reproduce the “problem” on an Intel Mac running Monterey 12.6 and DT 3.8.6 when clipping from Firefox and Chrome. So, maybe the blank space goes away with macOS 13?

10

Thank you for the explanation.

DevonThink3.8.6
MacOS Monterey 12.6.1
M1 Macbook Air
Browser: Safari & Arc

Thank you for letting me know that I’m not alone. :joy:

11

In the meantime, why not simply clip to paginated PDF? In makes more sense if you want to merge several PDFs, too (I think).

12

Good advice. Just my personal preference, for web articles rather than books, I like to keep the original picture of the web page. :blush:

One of the big problems with pagination is that it splits the images.

13

to do that i Clip as Markdown, then in DEVONthink i convert to PDF. images look great. Usually the compress with PDFPen but of course that not needed. i discard the markdown. Pagination is full and images do not split across pages.

1 Like
14

Only if the website owner doesn’t know how to provide a useful CSS for printing.

In this particular case, I’d say the bigger issue is the broken Mathjax at the end of the article.

2 Likes
15

Jim, any suggestions? :eyes: @BLUEFROG

16

Nothing useful to say at this time.
The issue persists in other browsers (using Kagi’s Orion lately) and on the beta of Ventura (and no, I don’t suggest people run a beta OS :wink: ).

17

So, can I understand that the Mac system is causing the problem? :thinking:

18

Update: A temporary compromise, the use of PDF Expert to remove the end of the blank. :joy: :melting_face:

19

I don’t think we can draw that conclusion, at this point.

20

Ok, thanks Jim for the clarification. At least now I can learn that I’m not the only one having this problem.