These past few days, I’ve suddenly discovered that I can’t clip Substack articles into DEVONthink; the result is blank, whether I save them as PDF or Webarchive. I’m using DEVONthink 4.0.
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Have you tried Markdown? It’s working for me.
Which format do you use for clipping? Clutter-free en- or disabled? And does a reboot fix this?
Welcome @magicmagic
A failing URL or two would be helpful.
Hello, saving as markdown works perfectly fine
Restarting doesn’t solve the problem. It works fine with Clutter-free, but without Clutter-free, it can’t be clipped, and the result is a screenshot.
Hello, it seems that all Substack articles are like this, but other web pages have no problems.
A screenshot? The fallback in case of failed clipping is a bookmark.
I found the problem. This issue occurs when reading articles in the Substack inbox, but it works fine when opening the article link separately. Thank you for your help
A general recommendation for dealing with problematic web pages that clip or copy/paste incorrectly, is to first attempt to view the page via your web browsers Reader View and copy/paste from there. If this doesn’t work, another trick is to alter the width of your web browser to a narrow width, that way the page should reformat its contents to a view intended for mobile phones, making it easier to copy/paste. If the publisher is especially devious, it’s useful to use a browser extension that allows you to change the browser User Agent on the fly to that of a phone browser User Agent, then reload the page with a narrow browser window width.
If none of the above work, it’s generally because the publisher is using anti-scraping measures. A more frequent strategy, in our post LLM online world.
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Good advice. I also find for some problematic web pages, especially Substack, if I copy URL to clipboard, then open on iOS device using Safari there (copy URL from shared clipboard) I can easily “print” to PDF and save successfully into DEVONthink. What fails on macOS Safari sometimes works on iOS Safari. If that attempt files, switch to Chrome browser (macOS and/or iOS) often works. And switching to “Reader” View on these devices also helps, sometimes.
Life.
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Thanks for your help
I have a similar problem using DT3 and the stock bookmarklet to generate PDF. It works fine on most web pages, but Substack results in a bookmark only. The problem started around the time this thread was opened. Interestingly, the same obscure groups keep coming up to classify these results, so there is a common fault for all my Substack pages. Are you able to find anything odd in the formatting of this page?
Not necessarily related, but I thought I’d mention that Indexing has been inconsistent. I just rebooted (which didn’t fix the Substack problem) and Indexing didn’t start working again (as it did once).
I just clipped this web page as a clutter-free, paginated PDF successfully. Without the clutter-free option only a white page is captured but even Safari can’t print a useful PDF (several white pages, some containing an image). And one has to endlessly accept cookies again and again. Definitely not the best web design.
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Back when I first downloaded the bookmarklet, there was only one. Are there choices now, including clutter-free?
Since clipping stopped working, I’ve been reliant on saving to a folder I Index. Now I’ve lost that function as well. Any ideas what might be wrong? BTW, I use Brave browser.
See Web Clip tab of Sorter which can be activated on demand, via sharing or browser extensions.
For web pages that require login access, SingleFile always works very well.