Web clipper in "Article" mode removes blank spaces between paragraphs, making text ugly

[fr0zensphere 1]

This is frustrating because it's soo close to the beautiful web page capture that I want, but this one problem kind of kills it. I'll get straight to an example. Here's one page that I wanted to save:

 

 

If it helps to diagnose this issue, the excerpt comes from here: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/wpa2-aes-tkip/

And this is what I get after I clipped it using the "Article" setting:

The paragraph returns are still there. It starts on the next line whenever the paragraph ends, but it removed all the extra blank spaces between paragraphs, and now this looks like a very ugly giant blob of text. I'm no programmer, but I would think that this should be something that is easy to fix in the code, no? Could the developers please, please fix this?

This is on FireFox, btw.

[Mike P 2,641]

I long ago stopped expecting webclipper to get every site right every time. I don't think it is realistic to expect this given the vast variety of webpages. Generally the webclip box has improved things but there are still some sites that just don't play nicely. My results are not exactly the same as yours (Chrome rather than Firefox) and seem possiby a little better. My approach generally if the webclipper messes it up is:

1. Try a different option. In this case the simplified article looks pretty good. Also don't forget that if you highlight the text you get a new option of "selection" which is also worth trying.

2. Another approach is to print the page to pdf and attach the pdf to the note. This is native within Chrome but pagination etc can make it a mess. It does work well if the article has a print option - but then clipping the print optimised page that normally appears often also works well.

[PinkElephant 8,103]

Another option - if staying close to the visual website is a concern: Use a screenshot tool that can create a "scrolling screenshot". It will show the site WYSIWYG, as it appears on your screen. It will save as a super-portrait-mode picture file, much longer than wide.

On my Mac I use the Shottr-menubar app to this end - no idea for Windows. Shottr can do the scrolling screenshot from top down or from bottom up.

Since it saves as a picture file, no embedded text, but EN will OCR it anyhow.

[Mike P 2,641]

48 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

no idea for Windows

Good suggestion. I've used FireShot, which is a Chrome extension, in the past.

[PinkElephant 8,103]

Yes, since I don’t use Chrome not an option for me, but maybe for others. 

Being a menu bar app, Shottr works on all sort of windows on the Mac, not only for browser windows.

[fr0zensphere 1]

2 hours ago, Mike P said:

I long ago stopped expecting webclipper to get every site right every time. I don't think it is realistic to expect this given the vast variety of webpages. Generally the webclip box has improved things but there are still some sites that just don't play nicely. My results are not exactly the same as yours (Chrome rather than Firefox) and seem possiby a little better. My approach generally if the webclipper messes it up is:

1. Try a different option. In this case the simplified article looks pretty good. Also don't forget that if you highlight the text you get a new option of "selection" which is also worth trying.

2. Another approach is to print the page to pdf and attach the pdf to the note. This is native within Chrome but pagination etc can make it a mess. It does work well if the article has a print option - but then clipping the print optimised page that normally appears often also works well.

 

I can appreciate you trying to be helpful with suggesting workarounds that could possibly be worth it in some cases, but I don't like how your post seems to be defensive of EN by saying that it's not realistic to expect improvements and implying that I should just live with it. What is then the point of having a sub-forum called "Web Clipper Issues"? I would think that the point of this forum is to point out issues so that those issues can hopefully be fixed/improved. Also, what I'm talking about is not even an expectation for it to work right on every website; I'm pointing out how in this case it is actually nearly perfect EXCEPT for this spacing problem. It seems to me that if they had done all the code to achieve this much functionality (which is impressive), it should be doable to fix this one part of it. I have a strong suspicion that the real reason why we're not seeing further improvement in the Web Clipper's capability is that the devs are not devoting effort to it. From their updates, it seems like they're focused (much?) more on developing new features rather than optimizing existing functionality.

[PinkElephant 8,103]

The forum is user2user. You are unhappy, post it. Somebody else sees it different, he posts it. It can be an issue, but this does not mean we all need to agree.

To get an official reaction by EN, issue a support ticket.

About this issue: I believe the job WebClipper does is just short of magic. There are so many content management systems, web designers trying new stuff etc. Even deciding what is content and which parts can be skipped is a challenge. The web Clipper converts it all, to store it in a HTML Container in a note.

Conversion to a standard HTML is necessary, and sometimes details are lost  in the process.

[fr0zensphere 1]

29 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

To get an official reaction by EN, issue a support ticket.

 

Oh, that's a good suggestion.

I was under the impression that the devs at least glance at these forums.  Before I posted this, I did a search and found a thread in which somebody said that they passed the info about a bug onto developers and thanked the OP for reporting it.

[Paul A. 620]

1 hour ago, fr0zensphere said:

 

Oh, that's a good suggestion.

I was under the impression that the devs at least glance at these forums.  Before I posted this, I did a search and found a thread in which somebody said that they passed the info about a bug onto developers and thanked the OP for reporting it.

Evernote staff does lurk on the forums, at least occasionally. To what extent, nobody knows, as they don't respond often.

[Mike P 2,641]

8 hours ago, fr0zensphere said:

I can appreciate you trying to be helpful with suggesting workarounds that could possibly be worth it in some cases, but I don't like how your post seems to be defensive of EN by saying that it's not realistic to expect improvements and implying that I should just live with it.

Other posters have already pointed out that if you want to raise the issue directly with EN then the support ticket route is by far the best route. Personally I think I was being pragmatic rather than defensive. Even if EN were able to address the issue it would take some time for this to happen. Then a different website would think of a different way to mess up the webclipper and we'd be back to square one. By pointing out different alternatives we've given you some different options to try. You are right that the forum is called webclipper issues but as fellow users all we can do is to give people tips, tricks, workarounds etc based on our experience.

I still beleive that putting webclips in a webclip box, although hated by some, has massively improved the quality of the webclips.

[Jay-Bob 127]

Hi@fr0zensphere, @MikeP, @PinkElephant @Paul A., thank you all for your input and for calling out the issue as well as possible workarounds in the meantime. We now have a report filed with this helpful information (I can also reproduce it) and the development team will take a look, but there's currently no ETA on when to expect a fix. Thanks again.

[fr0zensphere 1]

11 hours ago, Jay-Bob said:

Hi@fr0zensphere, @MikeP, @PinkElephant @Paul A., thank you all for your input and for calling out the issue as well as possible workarounds in the meantime. We now have a report filed with this helpful information (I can also reproduce it) and the development team will take a look, but there's currently no ETA on when to expect a fix. Thanks again.

That's really great to hear--thank you!