If anyone can show me that these features are indeed included in DTPO, that would be great. Otherwise, they remain annoyances that I would really like to see gone.
No way to drag an document/item you’re importing into a specific spot between other documents, as in Scrivener - you can only drag into a group.
As I’ve mentioned before, sub-groups don’t remember their open status if they are hidden in a closed group and you quit and restart.
Send to DT from Firefox is intolerably slow.
And here’s the question: what’s the best way to capture text from a webpage into a DTP doc, so I don’t have to capture as webarchive with ads etc intact?
Or if one is using a WebKit browser (Safari, OmniWeb, Shiira, DEVONagent), just select the text and choose Services > DEVONthink > Take Rich Note or press Cmd-).
In terms of what I’m sending to Firefox, it’s usually webpages from say time.com or other news site, single articles. So there’s a fair bit of ‘clutter’, ads etc.
I guess DTP has to index it all as well as load it from the web, but it can take up to 30 seconds, or time out (which the script does at 60 seconds) when not on a really fast web connection.
Like most other browsers, Firefox doesn’t provide access to web archive data, therefore the script has to download & create the web archive on its own. And this might need some time.
If you wish to do a lot of captures from the Web into your database, Firefox isn’t a good choice. It doesn’t communicate with Services and doesn’t provide hooks to AppleScript.
By contrast, Safari and other Cocoa browsers using WebKit allow capture of rich text notes from the Web through a Service with a keyboard shortcut, and retains the URL of the source page. DEVONagent and the built-in browser provide convenient contextual menu options for captures from the Web.
I do almost all Web captures as rich text of selected content, in order to avoid extraneous material such as ads and irrelevant text and links on a page. Many Web sites lay out their pages so that it’s easy to select just the desired article. Others provide a link to a “printer-friendly” version that eliminates clutter.
Note that a WebArchive document can be copied as a rich text document by selecting the WebArtchive and choosing Data > Convert > To rich text. Unwanted content can be discarded. Those who like to add highlighting can do so in the rich text version. Hypertext links can be added to a rich text document.
Like a number of us, I, too, am guilty of forever trying to make Firefox (version 3 now) work well with the Devon software; I, too, keep looking at all the many times you replied to Firefox-related questions to try to figure out what to do. You must be heartily sick of saying the same thing over and over again.
How about this way of getting all of us out of your hair about these pesky questions: maybe you can post a document somewhere, maybe entitled "Firefox and Devon, for all those who really cannot see the light and stick to DevonAgent … " with a summary of all the Firefox possibilities, limitations and methods for the different main Firefox versions.
Just a suggestion. Thank you for all your many, many informative (and patient) replies and postings.
Thanks for the info regarding FF, Bill. Firefox is one of those apps you really wish you could drop, but it just offers too much functionality (via addons).
Converting a web archive to rich text is a viable work around. Yet, it is just that: a work around.
I understand the problem with the services menu but it seems that if a program like MarsEdit is able within Firefox to capture, via a bookmarklet, selected text, page URL and page title that the good folks at Devon ought to be able to add one more bookmarklet that does this as well.
Safari is clean and fast but it just doesn’t have the breadth of capabilities that FF has nor does it work with many web forms and it would be great not to have to keep two browsers up all the time.
This topic reminds me of an idea WebKit-based browsers:
A few months ago SafariStand added a handy Clip Web Archive feature. It would be great if web clips like that could be saved directly to DEVONthink instead of as files, at least from Safari and possibly other WebKit-based browsers. The functionality would be analogous to the Take Plain/Rich Note Services (retaining the URL of source pages, as Bill mentioned earlier) with the advantage of superior layout preservation than is possible with Rich Text clippings.
I’ll be delighted if Services > DEVONthink Pro > Take Web Archive shows up in a future release. Thanks!