Multi-page Web documents

DEVONthink Tips
1

I’ve searched through some of the discussions on capturing Web content into DT, but I haven’t found a solution to this problem:

Let’s say I’m reading an article at Salon.com that is 5 “pages” long.  Typically there will be a link at the bottom of page one to continue to the next page.  If I want to capture the entire article to DT, I have to grab each page separately, using one of the conventional methods people have discussed here (Services Menu, copy/paste, drag the url, Dock Menus, Folder Actions).  While this gets the content into DT, those 5 pages are not linked together, ie, clicking the “continue” or whatever link at the bottom of page one either goes nowhere, or tries to take me back out to the Web via my default browser.  

The only way I’ve found to preserve the structure of the original is to save each page using a web browser, put them all into a common folder, and import that folder into DT.  The first document will usually be “Title of Article.html,” and the rest something like “index1”, “index2” and so on.  This works, but it’s labour intensive and clumsy (“index1” is meaningless in a search if you have dozens of documents with that same name).  Alternatively, I could use IE or iCab and save the entire “web archive” and just link that in DT, but then the content isn’t indexed, which defeats the point.

So… my fellow DEVONthink devotees, how are all of you saving your multi-page web documents in a clean, efficient way?

Any help appreciated!
-Vesuvio  :-/

2

One possibility is of course to use the “Append Rich Note” service if you don’t need the original HTML code of all pages (creating one huge article instead of many pages)

However, DT Pro will work like a real offline archive (similar to IE/iCab) including a download manager/site sucker (downloading all referenced files necessary to display HTML pages too).

E.g. if you click on a HTML link and the link destination is already inside the database, DT Pro will use the database contents of course.

3

Thanks, Christian, I gave that a try and I think it will do nicely for now (though the resulting document needs quite a bit of junk cut out).

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to DT Pro  ;).

-V

4

In the example you gave, have you tried this :

1.) Click the "Printer Friendly Version " link at the beginning of the article. Most online magazine articles have this, next to "E-mail this article".

2.) Select the whole thing using Command + a

3.) Take Rich Note.

5

Thanks, birameus, that works even better.  Less garbage to edit out for archiving.  (I’m a little embarrassed that it never occurred to me to try that, but at least my problem is solved!).

-V