How to Cleanly Capture Difficult Webpage?

DEVONthink To Go
21

I do a lot of saving to PDF. The devonthink clipper is pretty good here, but it doesn’t always work.

When it fails I try a browser extension that does the same thing. I’ve had good success with Print Friendly & PDF which works on multiple browsers. It does a conservative job of decluttering, then lets you easily hover over blocks and remove specific items with a simple button click.

Of course this is no good if you don’t like PDFs. But a lot of my work involves journal papers, technical reports, and so forth. Always PDF. So my workflows are built around that.

22

Kfast, that sounds awesome. I’ll look into it. Thank you!

23

Wow, this does a phenomenal job! I wish that it had the ability to do a single paged PDF. :slight_smile:

24

I use Clip to DEVONthink [now a bookmark in the toolbar with a dropdown menu). That gives me a WebArchive; good for my purposes and I like that it opens up Sorter so I can decide where to put it.

However, if I click on PDF in that dropdown, it does not open the Sorter; the file goes automatically to the Global Inbox, which adds a step, and more often than not it does not capture images, so I don’t use it. If you use Convert to pdf on a WebArchive page in DT3, it also loses the images so that’s not a good workaround…

If I use the OS Print function Control P: Save PDF to DEVONthink 3 it also goes to the Global Inbox, but it usually retains the images (at least from Wikipedia), however, pagination is often very odd and you lose all the hotlinks.

Another option: If you’re careful about selecting only the material you want on a webpage, you can often just Copy/Paste into Text Edit, or similar app [grab it in chunks if necessary.] And most images on a webpage will cooperate if you Control click and Save Image As, or Copy Image. May be more trouble than it’s worth for most things, but it works.

BTW, in my experience, the best way to eliminate webpage clutter is to use an add-on ad blocker in Firefox; maybe others have a different solution, but it works for me.

June

PS: And as an alternative to the current Clip to DT bookmark, may I suggest somebody look at Zotero; there’s an add-on icon in the browser – it opens up a little window that functions like the DT Sorter, so I can select which group to put a citation in. Very handy!