When using the web clipper with various options, I find myself needing to go to DTPO to preview the results. The Clutter-Free option is nice when it works, but it seems to be a hit-or-miss proposition (I’m looking at you forum.devontechnologies.com). Sometimes the Markdown format just does not do a site justice (but would be my preferred method of clipping).
I understand that clipping is messy business, so some kind of quick check would be helpful. I’m not sure what is technically feasible, but options might include
a pane that shows the result after clipping but before committing to DT, with the option to try another method
once clipped and viewing the item in DT, allow it to be clipped again via another method
Thank you for the suggestion! Which format do you use for clipping? If thumbnailing is enabled (see Preferences > Media) for the format, then a small preview is shown in the notification center after clipping.
I typically use PDF, but am interested in the Markdown also. The thumbnail is way to small to determine whether the clutter-free layout really worked. As an example, I clipped a clutter-free layout of this page and got only a few lines. Please see the attached PDF. It was unclear from the thumbnail whether the clip got all the data, but the resulting PDF is essentially empty. User Forum — DEVONtechnologies • View topic - Web Clipper Feature Request- Preview clipped document.pdf.zip (18.3 KB)
Ideally DEVONthink would become substantially better at clipping stuff to the point where I just know that the right things are getting clipped.
But as worthwhile of a problem to solve that is, I also know it’s very hard to get that right! Providing a preview would simplify my clipping workflow and let me clip with confidence.
Yep, I also find clipping hit and miss, especially with all the javascript privacy agreement overlays. Is there any way to disable javascript?
I actually find the most reliable clip is to clip as a Web Achieve, then from that convert to Formatted Note, it’s a bit of a pain though.
Does anyone have much success going straight for Formatted Note clips? If not, maybe tweaking this option as an auto two-step might be a way to improve it.
In the future you might want to do something similar to pdf friendly. They look at the page and present a dynamic block view with the X on each section that allows to remove any section manually.
A lot of times your implementation gets a lot of things correct but you still need to remove comments or other things on the page.
Hi! I’m not sure if I understood the problem here correctly, but it looks I am facing the same one. When webclipping (Safari) as PDF, it is never clear whether it works properly or not. As an example, a blog post I was trying to webclip as a pdf (in both paginated and non-paginated options), just creates a pdf file with the last 2 oaragraphs of the whole blog post (which has about 13 paragraphs).
Is there a way to fix this without a complicated workaround? I’m also in for the preview option for the clipped document.
@cgrunenberg at the risk of sounding flippant, could this thread not be considered an article? What makes something a valid candidate for clutter-free?
I understand that stripping out content can be a hit-or-miss proposition and I’m not faulting DT for that. The purpose of my original request was just add some kind of quick sanity check to the process. The manual method of going to DT to see whether it worked makes clutter-free an option that I don’t use much because of the uncertainty. If I could see immediately, while I’m still on the page, that clutter-free did not work, I could clip again without clutter free.
Generally it’s used on commerical and click-bait filled sites. It can be used on other sites too, but I generally use it only when necessary (and I honestly don’t spend a lot of time on those kinds of sites).
Usually I check first whether a website offers print versions of their articles, these are usually ideal for archiving and rarely require post-processing.
I don’t know if this is the correct place for this. But regarding the clipper, I’d would like to see a preview too.
About the tab, I had it in the menu bar, but have now moved it to the bottom left, which I prefer. But I hate the way it leaps about. I’m someone who has disabled doc magnification and have purposely gone into accessibility and enabled ‘Reduce motion’. Can you not have a preference that disables all the motion graphics leaping about and resizing, and just have it open, all tabs at web clipper window size, anchored to the bottom position.
