Is there a way to have links within a DTPro item, open in my browser (Safari) rather than in DTP?
If not, perhaps this could be added as an option.
Contextual menus of web views (e.g. of bookmarks, web archives or HTML pages) contain already such a command. Just right/control-click on a link and choose “Open Link in Browser”. Similar commands are “Open Frame/Page in Browser”.
To me, if you need to control-click and then select to open in browser is a broken feature. In fact, it’s a very frustrating feature.
I much rather have a preference “Always open links in browser” … there doesn’t appear to be any such preference though.
This is frustrating because many of my notes contain links. For example, I may have a list of links that I keep and notate on, and need to click on quickly. Many times you have to be very careful to control-click and open a link. It’s very tedious process, and it shouldn’t be. I just want to click on the link and open it in my default browser, simple.
Having a web page open inside DevonThink is worthless to me. Why? Because every time I click on a link my list of links disappear and I have to go back and look for the list to continue linking.
The inability to simply click on a link and have it do what I expect it to do is making me consider ditching this application all together.
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I don’t consider the default behavior of opening links within DEVONthink a “broken” design, but a highly desirable feature.
Here’s a partial list of things that can be done by opening a Web page within DEVONthink that cannot be done if the page is opened in an external browser:
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See Also works (as does see Related Text for a selection made on the displayed page). Do I have other content related to the displayed page, or have I perhaps already captured that page? A list of possibly related items in my database will be displayed.
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Option-click on a (single) selected term works. For example, if the displayed page contains the term hexachlorobenzene, Option-click on that term will display a list of documents in my database that contain that term.
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Browsers such as Firefox or Chrome cannot recognize the OS X Services to capture a selected excerpt of a Web page as rich text or WebArchive. Those Services allow one to exclude extraneous content on the page, but include in the capture any images, tables, lists and links within the selection. That cannot be done using Clip to DEVONthink. Capture of the selection as rich text uses the command Command-), and capture of the selection as WebArchive uses the command Command-%. Rich text is my preferred capture mode, as it will include images, links, etc. and is the most efficient filetype in file size of the resulting capture (sometimes orders of magnitude less in size by comparison of full-page capture as WebArchive or PDF). If preservation of an article layout of images and text boxes would be useful, I’ll capture the selection as WebArchive.
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If one wishes for some reason to switch to the default browser to view the page, click on the URL address field in DEVONthink’s browser. The page will open in the default browser. I use Safari as my default, because it includes the Reader feature that will automatically select the primary content of a page, such as an article, and present a rich text view of it that can be easily selected by Command-A, then captured by the Command-) keyboard shortcut.
My main database holds a Bookmarks group, which contains subgroups topically organized to hold hundreds of bookmarks that I’ve found useful for research. I find this much more convenient than were I to try to manage all those bookmarks within a browser.
Tip: I frequently include URL, Item Links or Page Links in my notes within DEVONthink. To avoid “losing” my view of the note when a link is opened, I Control-click on the link and choose either the option to open it in a new window, or to open it as a new tab in the note. The latter is very convenient for “pulling together” a group of related items that I may wish to switch between, without losing my scrolling position in each document.
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