I am trying to figure out the best way to save paywalled articles for offline use. My preference would be clutter-free web archives but those don’t work because they seem to struggle with the paywall. Results for normal web archives are better but the formatting is often messed up in offline view.
The best option seems to be to capture to PDF or capture a webarchive and then convert to PDF but the resulting font size is tiny. What determines the font size and is there a setting either in iOS or in DTTG that I could change to increase it?
I don’t know the answer to your question, but for most of my paywalled sites where Markdown doesn’t work, I seem to have success most of the time by showing the piece in Safari Reader View, and then I “save PDF to DEVONthink”. Sometimes the images don’t go thru, and then I show it in regular view and do same “save PDF to DEVONthink”. If once in DEVONthink it is a huge file, I use PDFpen to compress the file. I avoid web archive.
That’s how I usually do it too. Though often on Mac not iOS since Print to PDF doesn’t maintain hyperlinks on iOS but does on Mac for a mysterious reason. Apple have improved this workflow with recent updates and you can now save a PDF directly from the print window in iOS (it’s nice when they make a change to make things easier ).
The upside of doing this is that most files look the same - standard heading, font, font size, etc.
The downside is images don’t always load (depends on the website settings I think). This doesn’t always matter, obviously it depends on the image, but it does mean you can end up with white space sometimes. I do also find that a little styling is sometimes helpful to tell me what I’m reading, and printing in this way strips all that out (I.e. a Guardian article now looks the same as a New Yorker article, etc.). That’s just a personal thing though. It doesn’t work for some websites which have so much coding crap as to render them almost useless for printing (when that happens I mutter under my breath a bit and then try different options until I find what that I can bear to live with).
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