I’m a newbie, trying to understand the: Add... Web Page functionality.
Yes, I’ve searched, but haven’t found an answer yet.
Simple question(s):
1). When you Add… Web Page, is the resulting document an actual capture of the webpage located at the entered URL, or, is it just a link to the live web page?
2). If it is an actual capture if the web page, stored in your project (as I assume it is), is there a way to “refresh” this captured web page, to bring the captured web page document up-to-date with any changes.
N.B. I’ve assumed the Add… Web Page is actually a captured copy of the web page, as when I go offline, the “web page” still renders okay (again, assuming it would be a broken link otherwise).
Yes, by and large it is an offline capture. The technology provided by Apple (the same as when you save a page from Safari) is not perfect, so sometimes it doesn’t actually capture the whole page, or parts of it can still “leak” (ads in particular)—but these are gaps in the intended feature. It’s an old format that predates much of the more dynamic website stuff you can sometimes see now, like Gmail. Some things just won’t work at all with it because of that. But for your typical article pages, and even things like threads in this forum, it works fine.
There isn’t an “update” command, but you will note at the bottom of the viewer there is the original URL, which you can copy and then import again, trashing the out of date copy, if desired.
Thanks for your prompt reply. I’m still working my way through the 918 page user manual!
I guess I had hoped for a “shortcut” update feature, to avoid having to re-create the Web Page capture as a whole new document, and deleting the old one.
I suspect this also means having to first find, and then recreate any internal bookmark links to the captured Web Page etc. Not really ideal.
Ah yes, that’s a good point. If you are making good use of the binder features like links and metadata, then swapping out replacement items is less than ideal. But the notion of linking does bring up a good solution in fact: for anything that is changing frequently this isn’t really the best tool for the job anyway, and maybe using those actual Bookmarks themselves will be better.
Something I do a lot of in fact is create entries in the binder whose sole purpose is to hold a bookmark to the web (and maybe take some notes on it in the inspector, or add other related links), which you can make just like you would bookmark internal things together, by dragging from the URL bar of your browser into the bookmarks list. When doing so, you’ll note it gets a different icon and the viewer below can display the current state of the web page directly rather than archiving it and needing to update it periodically.
If you would prefer this be automatic rather than clicking a button to load it, there is a setting in Behaviors: Navigation, Automatically load web pages in bookmarks preview that turns off the opt-in button. We do have that turned off by default to avoid excessive net traffic from Scrivener as you browse around.
You might be thinking the sidebar is too small for all cases. While you can make it wider, also consider that you can drag and drop the bookmark into the main editor to view it there. You get a nice quick preview if that’s all you need, and if the site has a good “phone width” layout that can work well, but if you need more it’s easy to get that.
Thanks. Good suggestions, and lots for me to explore.
The only issue I see with using web links only, is that I do now prefer to capture the web page, as I’ve been caught before with 404 broken links to resources that I’d saved earlier.
I also don’t want to have to spend the time editing resource information (eg. If having to manually copy / paste actual external resource content to “save” it).
So far, the Add… Web Page feature of Scrivener has worked really well. Even better than when I was previously capturing web content in Evernote.
Perhaps this is because I seem to generally be capturing relatively simple informational web pages.
It was just that sometimes I have found that an earlier captured web page is now out-of-date, when the live source web page has added an update or correction.
So, in summary, I was hoping to be able to quickly & easily capture a web page (to make sure the info is not lost, if the web page later disappears), but then to also easily update the capture web page (retaining it’s bookmark links and notes etc.), if I later find that the live page has been updated with relevant information.
Perhaps this desire is unique? But I thought it worth explaining my reasoning, just in case it is a feature worth adding to your wish list somewhere.
I’m not sure what you mean? After I’ve Add… Web Page to a research folder, I currently link to it internally from my relevant draft document page(s).
If I later re-capture an updated copy of the Web Page, I need to re-link to the new replacement web archive page (hence why I was wanting to just update the existing page with a fresh capture).
When you add a web page to the research folder, that creates a document in the Binder. Like all documents, you can add internal or external bookmarks as document metadata. Click the “bookmark” icon in the Inspector pane; you’ll see a dropdown menu to flip between Project and Document Bookmarks.
I did think of a better way of going about this that doesn’t break the original binder item’s associations and organisation:
Recall what I said about how Safari saves web pages in this same format. You could click the blue link in the footer bar to load it in Safari (or right click and copy and load it, if that isn’t your ordinary browser).
At this point you can verify whether the page is still there, and that it’s in a state you really want to replace the prior with.
Use the File ▸ Save As... menu command from Safari to save a WebArchive. Dump it anywhere, it doesn’t even matter what you call it; Downloads folder is fine.
Back in Scrivener, use the Documents ▸ Replace Media File... menu command, and select the .webarchive file.
So it’s an extra step, sure, but it does protect you from that very scenario you referred to where pages can be damaged, moved, sites shut down or whatever—and if you just blindly ran a command to update it, you might end up faithfully preserving the 404 page instead.
Given that, you’d probably want to load it into a browser anyway just to make sure you want to update it, and while you’re there you can save it out.
P.S. For Windows users, we use MHT files, which most browsers can save, or have extensions that will allow saving, in .mht format. So the same trick works.
Brilliant! I just tried out that workflow, and that’s the solution I was looking for!
You are correct:- I would’ve loaded the original link in my web browser already, to have noticed it has been updated. So, if I want to update my copy, it’s just a Save As “WebArchive” from Safari, and Replace Media File in Scrivener (for the original captured document).
Awesome. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!
