Like several other Forum users, I expressed my doubts about DevonTech’s merger with AgentScience. But this is another sort of merger.
Do you hate the tendency of some websites to string an article out over a dozen pages just so they can jack-up their “eyeballs” quota for advertisers?
These days, even the NY Times seems to make a habit of slowing down reading by splitting a story with (say) 1200 words that could be downloaded in a second into three pages that take 30 seconds each to download while the margins fill with ads.
After you’ve snagged the pages of an article for DT (by selecting all in the center column of the page and hitting cmd-shift-0) you’re left with a small collection of RTF pages in DT that might (or might not) make searches more specific but are just as tiresome to scan as the web original.
I’ve just discovered the wonderful MERGE command on the DT ‘Data’ menu. Select the separate pages and choose merge (name them with sequential letters, if you wish to maintain or set the order in the merge). Now you have a single doc that might (or might not) be marginally less search-specific but is much easier to scan.
Here’s another trick for the NY Times ‘split article’ problem: Choose the Print option. That brings down the whole article as a single page, devoid (for the most part) of advertising. That’s especially nice if the article is split into 4 or 5 parts.
DT has another neat option for merging Web captures. Select the first page, use Services > DEVONthink > Take Rich Note. Then go to a second page, select text, and use Services > DEVONthink > Append Rich Note. I often use that trick to append comments to a MIT Technology Review blog article.
Very good advice Bill. I routinely use the “print” option on those pages that offer it then import the rich text using services. But I tend to forget about being able to use the “Append Rich Note” service after taking the first rich note. Thanks for the reminder!