(Archived) Mac + Firefox + Firefox extension = it clips just text

[sgabello 0]

I'm running across this problem... I've reinstalled the extension many times but it save nothing but text. It's not really useful if you can't save a complete web page with stylesheets and images. Is that a bug or I'm missing something?

Thanks

[heather 604]

Is this the clipper that was installed from the Web (the bookmarklet available at http://www.evernote.com/about/download) or the one that installs with Evernote for Mac>

The BookMarklet *should* be clipping text you've copied as it is formatted. The Clipper should be clipping plain text.

If you use Safari, however, it will always save the stylesheets.

[sgabello 0]

I'm using firefox's specific extension / addon not the bookmarklet. Are you saying that it's the right behavior in Firefox? Will it be fixed? I can't see the point in making a specific extension if it doesn't work properly. It's very annoying... I don't wanna switch to Safari... I love Firefox and I use a number of extensions / addons for my everyday work (I'm a web developer).

Are there plans to fix it? I saw that it has been updated quite often but I wonder why no-one has fixed fixed it yet.

Thanks for your help.

[heather 604]

That actually *is* the proper behavior. It was designed that way.

Web pages have a lot of errant code that can cause Evernote to crash. Safari is built "in" the Leopard operating system, so we can get our hooks into that and our native clipper can more gracefully handle the clips. Firefox is not, so we strip out all the CSS. It *should* be getting your images, but not the styles.

[sgabello 0]

Just let me understand... is it the proper behavior because you are not able to make it work properly or because you chose that? If the second is the right scenario, why not just leave to users the possibility to set it as they want?

Thanks!

[troygilbert 0]

You're seeing the right behavior... Firefox's clipper just grabs the text contained in the HTML and strips out the CSS. For some websites this renders them unreadable (when doing full page grabs). Which, for me, renders the Firefox clipper (and the bookmarklet as well) utterly useless.

In fact, I switched from Firefox to Safari in order to use the improved clipper. The Safari Clipper grabs the whole page (if you hold down SHIFT when you click the toolbar button) as a PDF (which is OSX's native rendering format and thus what Safari uses to render webpages). It works brilliantly -- so much so that, like I said, I switched to Safari full-time, even though that meant giving up a few favorite add-ons, Firebug, and a overall better browsing experience (personal preference).

The reason (I'm implying from the info I've gotten from Evernote) is that it's trivial to implement in the Safari Clipper (because, like I said, it's already PDF-formatted by the OS) and not with Firefox. They can trivially capture the current page as a bitmap (PNG, JPG, etc.) but it would be significantly larger than the PDF version *and* would require OCR to extract the text. Of course, I'd still love to have that option occasionally. Sometimes I can use the screen clipper to grab a screenshot, but sometimes I want the whole page.

For some cases, you could work around this by tapping into WebKit (Safari's engine) and having it render the PDF for a given URL or chunk of HTML... but then you have issues of re-issuing GET for URLs (which may or may not be okay), accounting for browser rendering differences (it may not look like what you're seeing in Firefox), add-ons (Greasemonkey scripts, etc.)...

The *real* solution would be for Firefox to render to PDFs, but that would require a huge chunk of its rendering engine to be more platform-specific than necessary for a very small use case.