Search through text of a webarchive impossible in DTTG?

DEVONthink To Go
1

I might look over a feature somewhere, but how does one search through the text of a webarchive after it’s opened?

Specifically large extensive webpages like national laws. Here’s an example of the German Civil Code:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/

Following the update to iPadOS 16.1, Safari is very - and I mean very - slow with finding words in the text of large webpages and PDFs.

I thought I could work around that by creating a webarchive and importing it into DTTG, only to find out it appears to be impossible to search through the webarchive in DTTG. When convert the webarchive to PDF, I can find words immediately however.

2

Why do you save law texts as web archive? Wouldn’t a pdf be the more natural choice?

3

Because such files can contain more information than the PDF and have a better lay out.

But the main question is: why isn’t it possible to search through a webarchive?

It sounds terribly easy to me.

4

Web archives are essentially HTML. So, for a sensible search, one has to filter out all HTML elements. Not something I’d consider „terribly easy“, but feasible.
You’re aware that web archives are an Apple-only thing and that Apple announced there depreciation? Though they’re apparently still there…

5

And Apple even added new APIs to generate web archives to macOS 11.0 and therefore after the deprecation :roll_eyes:

6

I like how consistent they are.

8

Hi I have the same problem, I’ve been saving all my Safari webpages as webarchive in DTTG, I’ve been doing it for years and I’m positive I used to be able to search them in DTTG, but now not only can I not see how to search but I don’t think they’re even being indexed and included in a global search anymore, did something change? Did you ever find out anything? I don’t want to have to convert every single file

9

Version 3.6.3 has a bug that might keep you from searching the content of documents. Please try to search for content: and see if it produces a result. If it does, version 3.6.4 fixes it.

10

Yeah using the prefix works, without it I’m only getting results from file names no matter what format, thanks for the help

11

Thanks for confirming. Expect an update in due course.

1 Like