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.