I understand that I can import a PDF into the “Research” area on the Binder? Can I do that by directly copying in the url of the relevant PDF to a new document under “Research” or do I have to import the PDF into my computer first? I have tried putting the url in (copied and pasted from the address bar) but it won’t import the pdf and I am not sure if this is not allowed or there is a particular problem with the pdf. I am just evaluating Scrivener at present and reading through Scrivener for dummies. Tried what I thought I was told, but maybe getting it wrong or it may just be for the mac version?
You can import webpages as PDFs by selecting the Research folder (or whatever folder you want to contain them) and then choosing File > Import > Webpage. Enter the URL there and from the drop-down menu choose to import as PDF. That should work, although the quality will depend a bit on how the page is set up. Sometimes you can get better results using some kind of readability plug-in or choosing the Print option to clean up the page a bit, then importing that.
That was what I had been trying but it didn’t work - I got an error message. But now I know that it is SUPPOSED to be able to work? Even in Windows? Then I will try some other PDFs and see if I can get it to work with those.
Thanks
Well, I have managed to get it to import some PDFs from my desktop and that is very useful, when you are doing research. I will try a different web based PDF and see if I can import that.
Are you trying to get Scrivener to convert a web page into a pdf on import, or are you trying to give it a URL of a pdf file stored on some website? The first way is taking an html-based web page and creating a PDF from it; that seems to work with most pages. The second way, you start with a pdf file that is stored on a remote server (a web server most likely), and probably wont’ work this way, because Scrivener is looking for some form of HTML to convert to a pdf, but it’s starting with a pdf instead.
I think it was the second way. I was putting a url into the research area. The url was already a pdf document that I can download to my computer. I had understood from the scrivener for dummies book that Scrivener could link to external PDFs but maybe I picked it up wrong. It’s not really a problem to download the PDF to my computer first and then link to it, as long as I know that’s how it works.
In order for any program to display a document, it has to download it first; your web browser just stores the text, image and other files in a temporary location that gets cleaned out periodicially. PDF viewers aren’t that sophisticated, so you get the issues you’re experiencing because it’s not designed to download the file into temporary storage and then display it. So yes, you’ll have to download the pdf to your computer and either import it into your project, or link to its location on your hard drive.
OK, thanks