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Web clipper print layout option?


Cartroo

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The web clipper is inredibly useful, but there's one feature that I sorely miss. The "simplified article" format is very useful to me as it tends to create a version of the page that also works well on my iPad, but unsurprisingly it doesn't work equally well on all sites. I'm sure Evernote may tweak their heuristics, but it's always going to be an uphill struggle to cope with the myriad of website layouts out there.

However, many sites have already done the work of simplifying their layout and presented it as a print stylesheet, so it seems to be me it shouldn't be too hard to offer a new option which renders the page as if for printing and saves that to Evernote.

Does anyone else think this would be a handy option?

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Hi.  Most clippers will offer an 'article' choice to select out the important content from a mess of adverts and links;  and there's also Evernote Clearly which specialises in simplfying page content into a standard font and layout - with some options as to both.

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Sure, but these approaches rely on heuristics which either work suboptimally or fail entirely on a significant number of sites. For example, they may incorrectly include or omit sidebars, include ads or comments. This is entirely understandable as there's no way one set of heuristics, no matter how clever, can cope with the wide variety of sites out there.

Print layouts, on the other hand, are written by site designers, so the work is already tailored to the site in question. So for cases where such a stylesheet is defined, it strikes me it would be sensible to offer it as an option in addition to the simplified article option.

With regard to Evernote Clearly, my understanding was that this has been largely superseded by the simplified article option in the web clipper?

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IME Clearly still sometimes works better than Clipper,  and I tend to use whatever tools get the job done,  superseded or not.  Also my eventual choice of clip is 'whatever works best' - sometimes a single-column article has a two column headline,  so I wind up getting the headline plus a column of unwanted items,  or the note will have the headline as a title,  and the content will be only the relevant text.  I have been known to clip both and then decide which to keep after looking at the note layout.  Your point about print versions is well taken however - sometimes pages will have a 'Print' link which leads to a (reasonably) clean text-only version of the content - and sometimes 2/3 pages are condensed into one.  Sometimes though the java link will just trigger my printer to process that web page as is.

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