Slightly Off-Topic: Organizing offline html files

Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 26, 2020 at 10:45 AM

I tend to print off articles etc. I find useful to PDF, saving them to a folder/set of folders indexed by FoxTrot Pro. I did use Curiota (macOS), the rather nice free app provided by the developer of Curio; this works extremely well if you’ve got a large set of subfolders. However, for various boring reasons I now use a simple PDF export option I set up myself in Safari’s print dialog box.

Having said that, some web pages won’t allow you to go into reader view, or even print off more than one page at a time. For these, I use Bear (macOS/iOS only), which has a truly great web page import option (driven by a Safari/Chrome extension). The page ends up as Markdown, plus whatever images were on the page copied to a subfolder. You can then export the Bear page (if you want to) as PDF or a number of other formats.

I regularly trawl through my (vast) collection of PDF files winnowing them down, or reducing file sizes using PDF Expert’s “Reduce File Size” option (again, macOS/iOS only).

Other options involving Safari extensions include Quiver (which handles web pages very well, but is restricted to macOS only) and Keep Everything (a rather good markdown-based information manager which hasn’t been updated for a while, but is very powerful; Bear is similar, however, in that it converts web pages into markdown).

MacJournal, DEVONthink and Scrivener also have “Save as PDF” options embedded in the macOS print dialog box, but I haven’t experimented with those. At one point I also set up Notebooks as a “Save to PDF” option, but found that this doesn’t always work predictably.

Cheers,
Bill