I appreciate the speed with which the problem is solved! Thanks!
However, for the The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Instapaper service worked better that the current ‘use clutter free layout’: the latter, unlike the first, removes the Bibliography, Academic Tools, Other Internet Resources, Related Entries sections and the copyright note with the author’s name.
Any chance that this will be improved in a future release?
Arno, for a modest fee you can join Friends of SEP and download unlimited PDFs, which are much nicer than any of the above methods. Just saying.
Have just joined up to say pretty much the same thing as arnow, though I’ve experienced the problem with far more than just one website. I appreciate the fact that you’ve tried to resolve this as quickly as possible, but unfortunately your new Markdownifier isn’t anywhere even close to being as good as Instapaper.
I tend to clip a lot of newspapers, and I could always rely on Instapaper to do a remarkably good job of separating the wheat from the chaff, while also providing essential information about the article, such as the name of the author, the date, and the publication it appeared in. Markdownifier comes close on the last of these, but gives the website, not the name of the publication. Instapaper tends to be able to accurately recognise and include the main image for a particular story, whereas Markdownifier often seems to throw it out. I’ve also seen some very odd results with captions. As an example, “(Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)” became “(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)” though neither the video nor the photo survived. With a page from the Sydney Morning Herald, I’ve seen Markdownifier half digest and regurgitate a video panel that had nothing to do with the main story. It removed any reference to the relevant part of the panel, but included two photos from each of the eight advertised stories, with the two photos being at different sizes.
There’s also the question of style. In the past I’ve always tended to use Web Archives because the page that Instapaper produces tends to be far more readable than any of the other options. Though it’s far from being the only issue, column width is a significant factor here. Instapaper typically produces columns of about 75 characters including spaces (a little less than I’d prefer, but absolutely fine); Markdownifier is producing columns that are more like 175 characters wide, which is way outside any readability guideline that I’ve ever seen.
As things stand, I’m reduced to trying to persevere with Instapaper, via arnow’s workaround, but with mixed results. So from my point of view, two weeks after the problem first came to light, there’s currently no workable solution.
I hope you won’t mind me pointing out that Instapaper have obviously been working on this sort of thing for quite a while now, and the best and easiest way forward is probably going to be to find some way to get Instapaper working with DevonThink again.
Perhaps it’s time to contact them and see if you can’t work out some sort of deal.
I appreciate the difficulty of solving the problem of making a page readable, and I’m glad you were able to find a solution quickly for at least one platform. However, in my opinion, the markdownify service is not an adequate replacement. Not only does it leave out images that Instapaper included, but sometimes it misses the content entirely.
I ask you to please look for a better service to use.
Tried to login today using DTTG on my iPad. Got the reply that I had tried too many times. Any expired ETA for a fix to this issue?
Thanks,
Lewis
Tried to login to what… Instapaper? We are no longer using the Instapaper service, so no - there is no forthcoming fix for it.