DEVONthink workflow

I’ve tried both the DEVONmenu & Web To DEVONthink workflows and I still can’t get what I want. I would like a clean (ie reader view) of the document saved to Devon as a PDF, not Web Archive. Is this possible on iOS?

if you enter Safari Reader mode, then use the Create PDF action from the Safari Share Sheet, you can then use the Clip to DEVONthink action to capture the PDF.

The only strange thing is that the “Create PDF” action will generate a single page PDF regardless of the length, so that may not be desirable.

Another approach is to enter Reader mode and use the “Print” action, and then reverse-pinch the print preview and clip that PDF to DEVONthink. This will generate a paginated PDF. This process of obtaining a PDF from the Print interface has been talked about several times by Dave and Katie so if you aren’t familiar with it you may want to listen back to a few episodes…

3 Likes

Thanks @Scottisloud. I had not tried the print feature to save to devonthink. That is certainly another option. On the plus side, it creates a beautifully formatted pdf. On the down side, it does not save the url in Devon. I am happy to see that it saves the title, so that’s a plus, but the original source url is a big deal.

Unless you know a trick I don’t, this option does not retain the title of the article or the source url.

If it’s not apparent from the PDF that I have already clipped, and I want the URL, I generally opt to “Copy to DTTG”, from iOS Safari, as opposed to “Clip to”. This then takes me to the actual (newly-created) file inside DTTG, where I can open up its info-viewer.
One can then quickly jump back to Safari, copy the URL, and jump back to DTTG, and paste the URL in.
It’s a few more steps, but since I don’t do it frequently, works fine.

If this is something you want done each time, then I think this would be a good candidate for a Workflow workflow. Fairly certain someone has worked out how to do this iteratively, since it essentially involves simply creating a file, and then pasting a URL in after the fact. Have you looked/asked over at the Devonthink forums?

I do not know a trick you don’t, I’m just a poor reader who missed those criteria from your earlier post!

This is extremely useful. Thanks so much!

@RosemaryOrchard is it possible for a Workflow workflow to do what I’m after? I’ve tried using the two I mentioned at the top of this post and they both come in as web archive instead of pdf.

I am trying to get this workflow to work, not sure if it’s what you are looking for. Maybe @RosemaryOrchard can help us both if it works out.

I have articles saved in Pocket. I have an IFTTT recipe (found online) that after I favorite an article in Pocket, it gets sent as a PDF to Dropbox, Folder Action Setup for OCR, and then sent to DTPO.

My issue this feels sluggish, waiting for the IFTTT to kick in. Looking if there are better ways to get this to happen. (and for a cleaner automated view)

I built a TouchBar button with Automator & BetterTouchTool to do what I want. Full post and details here: DevonThink Help