Hi all,
I recently downloaded the NaNoWriMo trial version for this year’s contest, and am in the process of setting up my outline and adding research material for this year’s adventure. I had a question though.
When I go to add a web page to my Research material, I am afforded with four different options for method of import. Obviously Text is just that…text. However, I’m a little confused on the other four, as to whether there’s any particular differences in the final information that’s generated within Scrivener.
PDF Import via Internet Explorer and PDF Document via WebKit are obviously generating PDF documents. Frankly, I didn’t see IE open for me when I tried that option. Is it using it in the background?
And when I tried Webpage Complete (MHT) the page that shows up looks exactly the same as either of the PDF options.
Are there size benefits to using MHT vs PDF? If not, what are the benefits, if any, for not using the traditional PDF?
The PDF options just use different tools in the background to convert the page to the PDF format. Depending on the original page, one converter or the other may look radically better, so we offer both as options. Usually the default PDFKit version works well, but if you’re not getting good results, try switching. Sometimes one or the other maintains the original page layout or text crispness better.
MHT is Microsoft’s web archive format. This best preserves all aspects of the page, but at the moment it can’t be loaded directly in Scrivener’s editor; you’ll need to use the Open in External Editor option to view it in a browser that can view the format. Internet Explorer is typically the default, but Chrome also supports MHT; Firefox and others have extensions that let them load MHT files. You can set any of these as your system default for the .mht extension and Scrivener will then automatically launch that browser with the file loaded when you click the link in the editor.
So in general–PDF is probably your best option now since it lets you load it in the editor; it’s also cross-platform compatible if you happen to also work on a Mac. If you don’t care as much about viewing it in the editor or better preservation of the layout, fonts, images, etc. from the webpage are more important, use MHT.