DEVONthink Bookmarklet or Print to in Safari for iOS

Excuse me for this most certainly very stupid question but I am not a user of iOS devices yet:

Is it possible to save internet pages as PDFs from Safari for iOS with a DEVONthink To Go bookmarklet or print from Safari PDFs to DEVONthink To go? And if so, will these PDFs sync with DEVONthink Pro Office on the Mac?

Thanks in advance for your help.

It is not possible in IOS Safari to print to PDF or save to PDF without using a 3rd party app, such as Save2PDF. (Which I personally use quite a bit with good success.) On my local network I’ve used Printopia for years and print pages from iPad or iPhone to DEVONthink on the desktop. It is possible also to use apps such as Save2PDF to make a pdf, send it to DEVONthink to Go for syncing to the desktop DEVONthink. I believe other iOS browsers (Dolphin?) have plugins for PDF capture.

I tried several pdf-apps for iOS 8 and found out that Readdles Convert to pdf has the highest success rate.

I fails from time to time when the webpage is containing certain type of content but I have a hit rate of about 90%.

Sometimes just taking a screen shot is the only thing that works.

So I go to the webpage in Safari on my iPhone, Share with PDF Converter, takes about 30 sec to 2 minutes depending on how much info that is on the page, then I tap Open in, choose “Open in DEVONthink” and then the file ends up in Global inbox in DTTG on my iPhone and after syncing Devonthink with my computer it is usable anywhere.

Sleek system and the outcome is good. I use it a lot. Again, Devonthink is the app who has changed most since I bought my SE/30 in 1988!

Thank you both for your very helpful information.

Doesn’t sound too encouraging to make me buy an iPad though. I thought it would make a nice reading device (and not only that of course). But most of the times when I read web pages I’m in “I could use that for something” mode—actually, whatever I do I am in that mode. Almost.

So I hoped for a seamless transfer from the iPad to my Mac. As PDF because I need stable content.

Would Safari’s reading list be a workaround too? I press Cmd-Shift-d or however that works in Safari for iOS and open it later in Safari on the Mac and then there do the Print to DEVONthink or the bookmarklet routine?

Or maybe I could use services like Readability or Instapaper?

Or can the apps you mentioned save the PDFs to a folder in the iCloud I have access to on the Mac?

The word “laborious” manifests in front of me in huge neon letters. But the nice new Mac Book’s price range starts at iPad times three. And even the latter one I would not buy just like that.

I’ve used Printopia like korm mentioned, and I sometimes use PDF Converter by Readdle (an excellent app and similar, I expect, to the PDF utility that korm mentioned). I’ve also tried saving documents to Pocket and Instapaper and subscribing to their feeds in DEVONthink for Mac. I’ve also added web pages to Safari’s Reading List and later ‘Export to PDF…’ from the Mac.

In my experience, the easiest way to make a PDF document on iOS is using yet another utility-Workflow. This is just a fantastic and incredibly useful app on iOS, and it comes with an included convert to PDF workflow so you don’t have to create your own. Display the web page in Safari, select the share icon, run the workflow, then select the share icon on the finished document to sent it to DEVONthink to Go or any other app that can work with PDF documents. Workflow is also not a one-trick pony, so it can do so much more than just create PDFs.

If you don’t need the PDF to be immediately available on iOS, the Safari Reading List option with exporting as PDF from Safari to the DEVONthink Inbox on the Mac is free, and will likely give you the best quality PDF document of all the options listed.

Don’t be discouraged. The iPad is actually a great device for collecting and saving things. The ideas above are all very useful.

Right now, IMO, DEVONthink To Go is the weakest link in the process. and potentially that will get better some time in the future. Personally, I’ve never used DTTG to collect things from other apps on the iPad, and probably would not try it again for that purpose. There are many better options.

I’ll add Handoff to Greg’s advice about the Reading List. Sometimes I open a lot of tabs in Safari iOS then back on the desktop I use iCloud Tabs and harvest those tabs with the DEVONthink Clipper.

Think I read somewhere that the next version of iOS has a “Print to” function that could be harnessed for just this purpose.

It is YOUR, YOUR, and YOUR fault that I spent a hell of a lot of money (compared to my poor savings) on my new iPad!

Just kidding, it is really great to find people who are not only very helpful but do exactly understand my needs.

So I got an iPad and the hardware was surprisingly better than I had expected—and I had huge expectations.

The software on the other hand … surprised me too, but in a negative way, even though you had warned me.

I started with the Save As PDF extension of Workflow because I knew that even when this extension didn’t work well I could use the app for multiple other uses. And it did not work well. Neither did Printability which I tried next because it came free.

So as soon I heard about the new Save As PDF feature in iOS 9 I installed the beta.

And what can I say—the results are very pleasing. In combination with the reader view (if available) to my experience about 95% of the created PDFs are perfect. The PDF contains the URL and a time stamp. And Save As PDF is so much faster than everything you could do before iOS 9.

That was the good part. Now to the bad: At the moment Save To PDF exclusively sends the PDFs to iBooks which is kind of a dead end.

First of all iBooks does not really know about sharing files. You can print the PDF or send it by e-mail. If you got more than one PDF you have to send them one by one. You could select a number of files in iBooks but you can only bulk delete, not send.

And then there is syncing. Oh boy. I don’t know if the combination of iOS 9 and Yosemite (my Mac is my working machine, I can’t risk to go beta here too) is involved in this, but it is catastrophic. Syncing works only over WiFi and you have to use the dreadful iTunes.

Worse than that, when the title of the PDF that has been created automatically from the web page’s title contains a colon at best it gets ignored in the syncing process. Meaning, it stays in iBooks for iOS but never shows up in iBooks on the Mac. But most of the times the PDFs containing colons not just never show up on a Mac after syncing but also silently get erased on the iOS device. Which is BAD.

When the iOS device is connected to your WiFi network and you start iTunes on your Mac to do something that is not at all related to the iOS device—say, you want to listen to music—iTunes starts the sync and might wipe some PDFs from the iOS device just like that.

Which means at the moment the only really save way to get all PDFs from web pages in iBooks on the iOS device to the Mac is to switch off syncing in iTunes and send the PDFs by mail.

I hope Apple will not only get this fixed but make this an open API which allows to send PFDs from web pages to all applications. Like to DEVONThink To Go 2.

Congratulations on the iPad!

There are 3rd party PDF capture apps for iPad. I used “PDF Converter” which includes a “Convert to PDF” extension for Safari. The PDFs can then be send to another app, a cloud service, etc. PDF Converter is not the only option.

Apple has fixed the colon problem with yesterday’s iOS beta. I. e. when creating the title for the PDF the : gets replaced by a _.