Exporting webpages to DevonThink as PDFs

For me, Exporting a webpage to Devon think is messy and problematic. Exporting a URL as a text does not protect me from future changes to the displayed webpage. My solution uses another app to convert the URL to a PDF before sending it to DevonThink. I’m using an app titled URL2PDF but there are others out there.

The Process:
Safari - with the desired webpage displayed copy the URL. Now switch to URL2PDF.

URL2PDF - When started, URL2PDF automatically opens the webpage for the URL previously captured to the clipboard. Once the page is loaded, clicking on the ‘Convert to PDF’ button on the top right will generate the PDF. After done, click the arrow to return to URL2PSF’s list of PDFs and select the PDF. The PDF will open and the button to send the document elsewhere will appear at the top. Select ‘Open In’; select ‘Open in DevonThink’ and the PDF is copied to and displayed in your DevonThink database.

Since both URL2PDF and DevonThink retain copies of the PDF, deleting the one in URL2PDF frees up memory.

Thank you for this great tip!

I would add that URL2PDF has an internal web browser. It is less sophisticated than Safari but if you are just scavenging webpages, using URL2PDF’s browser speeds up the process quite a bit.

I have been successfully using a different approach (but one which relies on a wifi connection with the Mac). I have installed Printopia on the Mac which allow various virtual printers to be set up, which then appear in the Print dialogue in iOS. The virtual printers can either send output to a real printer, or a pdf to a designated folder on the Mac or to a specific application on the Mac. I have set up DevonThink as one destination. So the workflow is simply to bring up the Print dialogue in Safari iOS, choose DT as the destination, and then subsequently carry out a sync in DTTG.
As a refinement, I have an alternative destination which is a Mac folder that has an attached folder action, the effect of which is to OCR the incoming pdf and import it into the DT Inbox (I guess the script could define a specific database for import). Syncing then gives me a nice OCRd file in DTTG. There have been previous forum posts on this method but I thought it worth mentioning here again.

To riff on @khw’s Printopia suggestion – iOS Safari has a pretty good Reader feature to produce simplified ad-free results. I configure Printopia on my laptops / desktop to print to a Dropbox folder. So then I use Safari iOS’s Reader --> Printopia --> Dropbox, where I can find the PDFs for access on all machines.