When I capture a webpage from Safari as a clutter-free PDF (one page), I find that the size of the font on the PDF is too small and each line has too many words. So, I don’t really feel like reading the PDF and return to Safari to read it. I was expecting the font to be of more or less the same size on the PDF or, if the amount of characters per line is going to be changed, to be done in a similar manner as Safari’s reader view (not using long lines).
I have noticed that if I play with the size of the window in Safari, and make it very narrow, I get a bigger font and less words per line, but it takes time to get it right and it is not a workable solution for me.
Should I expect this to be improved eventually or should I forget about converting web page to PDFs if I want a font size/line length to be more as in web pages or books?
I was looking forward to using this feature and I am concerned that it doesn’t work as I expected.
Please see a couple of examples: Safari vs. DEVONthink’s PDF conversion
You can print to DEVONthink from Safari, either with Reader View activated or not.
In my experience print to PDF with Reader View most of the times has the best results. That does depend on non-text elements of the page and if the Reader View algorithm is able to distinguish context images from ads.
It’s not a workaround. It’s just a different way of capturing web content as PDF to DEVONthink.
There is no single always reliable way of capturing web pages—this goes not only for DEVONthink but for all apps, news readers like Reeder or Newsify, read-later apps like Goodlinks, and for browser Reader Views of all kind too.
The reason is that web pages differ so much in their construction. In many cases on purpose because the owners of web sites want us to view their pages as they intend, i. e. with the advertisements which finance their sites. So they do not have any intention at all to deliver a format that easily transforms to a “clutter-free”, that is: add free, document.
Like I said, Safari’s Reader View works best for me because it works with the majority of sites I visit regularly. And Save PDF to DEVONthink respects that view. Other sites need a different handling. One has to find out site by site.
It is a workaround for me, because, so far, most of the pages that I’ve tried to capture as PDF with DEVONthink’s Sorter appear with a font that is too small and with lines that are too long.
Couldn’t that be improved?
I found a message from 2019 that complains about the same thing (he demostrated the problem with Devon Technologies’ blog).
By the way, the pages that I capture with the Sorter are indeed clutter-free – that has worked great with the Sorter. With all the pages that I’ve tried your suggestion (printing Safari’s readers view), DEVONthink used a font with a size that I would expect, but I couldn’t create non-paginated PDFs.
Strangely enough, when I tried to capture some pages within DEVONthink, using its built-in web browser, I got different results than with Safari (from fonts with the right size to empy documents with just one line at the top).
I was reading the manual and this is the first URL that I tried:
Then I tried this one and got the same problem:
To be fair, probably I had bad luck. Because a couple of days ago most of the pages that I tried had the same problem, but I just tried to capture pages on other websites, and the PDFs worked great.
