vanderwal.net

Single Page PDF Option for Webpage Capture

Every now and then I get a bee in my bonnet about something. Often it is about something that has been long brewing. A current one, is PDF pagination. It is incredibly rare that I print anything. I regularly store / archive webpages in PDF, using DevonThink / DevonThink and for much more than a decade that PDF has been a “single page, continuous PDF”, which has no page breaks.

There is no reason (for the last 10+ years) to only offer multiple-page pagination for a PDF. It can be an option, but it’s driving need is the printer and rarely do PDFs get printed, as they are consumed on screens that we easily scroll.

A friend, Tantek, pointed me to Firefox (or derivative, a week ago I moved my work and research browser from Arc to Zen Browser to handle my spaces and capability to easily handle an abundance tabs) as it has good PDF capabilities built in. Firefox does have a lot of really good PDF tools (I deal with a lot of academic papers and related texts in PDFs). Firefox also has a full page screen capture, which is insanely helpful, which makes is really strange that there isn’t a similar single page PDF or “Print to PDF” option for one continuous page PDF capture of a web page.

Why Single-Continuous Page PDF?

Why is single page PDF such a need for me? Most of our interfaces around the web, or even our tablet note taking and beyond are one long page. PDF has long been, and still is, a great archive mechanism for holding onto and sharing things of interest that work across time. PDF is better than saving a web interface in its native form, as every 8 to 10 years there is a large enough change accreted that break web view files that are older and assemblages of components that they don’t consistently work in a browser. Having a colleague share their hand written notes from GoodNotes or Notability as a PDF often have pagination breaks in the middle of text, formulas, diagrams, etc. that have no need to be paginated at all. Most digital information and knowledge workflows don’t ever hit paper, nor have a need for multiple-page pagination. Multiple-page pagination as the only option is more than a decade outdate, but it seems only DevonThink offers a modern option by default.

Having the option and setting a preference for continuous single-page pagination printing to PDF (just like DevonThink has been doing for more than a decade) is needed in browsers and most of our digital applications. It is long past time to catch-up to this past decade, if not farther past.

My Browser Family

Browsers come up often in discussion. But, in a recent MacSparky Labs meetup, one of the discussions started going deep on browsers. I mentioned how and how much I abuse my browsers. Also, how I manage the volume of what flows through.

My Browser Use

I have four browsers open on my laptop nearly always. I use Choosy to route links coming in to the browser I want it to go to. I don’t count my RSS feed reader, NetNewsWire as a browser, but see it as a pre-browser. I use Safari, Google Chrome, Zen Browser, and DEVONagent Pro as my core and are always open. I also use regular Firefox, but not as much.

Safari - The Triage Workhorse

Safari is my browser that takes a beating and often where I open a tab for general reading. I use quite a few extensions, which all work well in Safari. The regular extensions are for passwords, Readwise (for local highlighting extraction and full page capture for future lighting and annotations), Instapaper (this is less for reading later, but capturing and sending a link to my personal Slack instance as well as feeds DevonThink RSS aggregation), Choosy (used to push a link to another browser for a focussed task), Obsidian web clipper, screen capture for full page capture, Stop the Madness, and Wayback Machine.

The biggest advantages for Safari are how well ad blocking works from extensions, the Reader view, and having an insane amount of tabs open at once (I’ll often find I have 1,000 tabs open after 60 days, which it is so easy to open the left sidebar, click tabs, command+A to highlight all open tabs, copy, and paste into a markdown document as a good bulleted markdown list of title and link lists - then commit “tab bankruptcy” and close the window and start a new one).

Chrome

I use Google Chrome mostly for things Google, like YouTube, Google Maps, Google apps, some social networks which get JavaScript heavy. Chrome can handle some heavy use, but nothing like Safari can handle. There are a lot of sites that only work properly in Chrome, which feels like poor development practices of the late 90s and early 00s are back again.

Zen Browser

Zen browser is built on Firefox and replaced my use of Arc browser for its Spaces (compartmentalized browsing sections with their own tab collections) and left sidebar tabs. Zen is my browser I work in (other than the first Space, which is more fun regular access). I have 12 Spaces with one with productivity focus for things around Obsidian, note making, my vanderwal.net related resources, Personal InfoCloud site related resources, Apple Developer, techno-social cognition research, O’Reilly Media related research, one for grad student mentoring, and others for focussed related reading and notes.

I really like the Firefox foundation with all the extensions offered, good security, good privacy, and incredibly good PDF resources built-in. There is a lot open at once in the Zen browser as well and it just keeps chugging.

DevonAgent Pro

DevonAgent Pro is one I use mostly for one purpose, capturing pages as single continuous PDFs and directly add them into DevonThink and easily annotate the metadata. When in Safari or Zen I use the Choosy extension to open the page into DevonAgent and click command+option+P to capture the logged-in page easily. There are extensions for DevonThink, but it is a bit buggy at times and often doesn’t capture my logged-in state, so DevonAgent Pro becomes my go to. I will also use it for research as it has nice features to easily capture assets and its direct connection to DevonThink.

Firefox

While I keep the four above always open, I also use Firefox as my Facebook browser when I go there as it does a really good job keeping Facebook’s creepy privacy tendrils at bey along with a plug-in that is a Facebook fence.

I also use Firefox for a handful of Streamlit • A faster way to build and share data apps browser-base data analysis web apps. Firefox does a good job keeping things contained and the interactive data builds in Streamlit won’t impact anything else.