Jump to content
  • 0

Clipping pages vs. just saving pages as .PDF files?


stanwelks

Idea

I make .PDF files of web page articles and info all the time on my Mac, and then I will generally save it to a folder on my Mac. What is the advantage to instead making a web clipping using an EN extension? I am guessing it is the ease of tagging it for finding later? If so, what about just uploading my .PDF into EN and tagging that? What am I missing?

 

Thanks.

Link to comment

4 replies to this idea

Recommended Posts

  • Level 5*

I clip web pages using both PDF and HTML, but I use HTML the most.  Both are stored in Evernote.

  • Most of the time I do NOT want the entire web page, so just clip the web article, and make a custom selection
  • Once the HTML clip is in Evernote, I can easily edit it, to add highlighting, clean up the page, add comments, and in some cases use the "simplify formatting" to make a complex page readable.
  • It is very easy to copy text from the HTML clipping.
  • The few times I clip a web page with PDF is to preserve exactly what is on the page in case there is any dispute later with the vendor or owner of the web site.

Of course the benefit of putting both in Evernote is the same as for any Note in Evernote:  quick access across all my devices, search, tagging, having all (or almost all) my info in one place.

Link to comment

I thought EN clipped pages as screenshots, I did not realize they were HTML based. 

 

1. Do you make your custom selection by using the highlighter to highlight the portion you want? I did this and the result was a bit off.

2. How do you get your clipped HTML pages out of EN? Just copy and paste into another document?

 

Thanks.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

You can clip web pages as either text (HTML), or image.  I almost never use image.

I mostly use the EN Web clipper add-on for Chrome Browser to clip HTML.

 

If I need the clipped HTML pages in EN, I usually copy/paste, although you can also export an EN Note as HTML.

Link to comment

The big advantage to using PDF is that it will capture some aspects of the page that HTML won't. 

 

For example, a Tweet embedded using Twitter's standard widget will NOT be captured if you clip the page it appears on. However, if you print the page to a PDF (using Chrome), it will be represented. 

 

The problem is with iframes and related elements: Evernote will not capture the content of iframes when it's clipping. 

 

This is not surprising and doesn't necessarily represent a defect -- for some very good technical reasons you would NOT want capturing the content of an iframe to be the default behavior -- though it is definitely a limitation, and a surmountable one. It should be theoretically possible* to use Google's PDF support to clip directly to PDF. However I think it's more likely you'll see some third party to that than see it in the Evernote clipper, at least right away. (Again, I don't blame them. To me, it's a pain, because I very often want to save Storifies or other pages that have embedded tweets, and if I do that in Evernote they've basically got a hole in them.)

 

--

*anything is theoretically possible, if you're willing to spend enough $$ and throw enough RAM at the problem.

Link to comment

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...