I’m new to Scrivener, and Mac, and merrily setting everything up. I’ve been importing my favourite webpages and am wondering if it’s possible, after opening a webpage, to continue clicking around and viewing links within Scrivener.
At the moment I can view the first page, but when I click on a hyperlink it opens in Safari. I’d like to avoid the distraction (and temptation) of opening an external browser if possible.
Apologies if I’m missing something. I can’t see anything under preferences.
Hi,
No, this isn’t possible - when you click a link it will always open a browser. This is because Scrivener isn’t built to be a web browser in itself, but just to allow the importing of web pages for research purposes.
All the best,
Keith
Not to worry. Thanks for that.
DevonTech products (DevonNote, DevonThink, etc), use the WebKit engine that powers Safari and Chrome. So when you capture a page, you may click links and forward-backward buttons as in a browser. When you find a page you like, you may save it in the same database. If you use web pages a great deal in research, you may want to try these products.
Scrivener uses WebKit too - the browser buttons don’t come with WebKit, though, you have to add all that yourself in your own code, along with a great deal else. With Scrivener I specifically chose not to incorporate a browser, as that’s an entirely separate sub-program that needs supporting in and of itself. In an early version of Scrivener I allowed limited browsing, but it just led to users wanting more and more browser capabilities, and as soon as you start down that road there’s no end…
All the best,
Keith
hi all, i’m having some troubles with web page imports, seeking guidance.
i’m demo-ing scrivener – on day 8 – and am mostly happy, but for one big problem: the Web page import seems to be really clunky, slow and unstable. It can take 10s of seconds, or up to a minute, for a page to load. Quite often “chunks” of the web pages are duplicated, especially ads.
i’m using scrivener for mac, with firefox browser.
any links to older threads dealing with this – i checked but didn’t see much? recommendations, fixes or workarounds? is this something that can be debugged in future versions?
many thanks, adam
Scrivener uses the WebKit - the same as Safari - to create .webarchive files internally which get stashed inside the project. One oddity of WebKit is that if a page contains an advert at the top, it can often appear duplicated when the page is stashed as a WebArchive file. As Scrivener is just calling on Apple’s WebKit for this functionality, unfortunately I have no control over that. Some web pages will take longer than others to download, especially if they have lots of images, as all of the resources need saving and bundling into an archive. Tens of seconds seems extreme, but it should take the same amount of time as it takes Safari to save a web archive (File > Save As…) in Safari, and it will depend on what you are importing.
One thing you can do is convert any imported web pages to text (Documents > Convert > Web Page to Text). It won’t maintain complicated layouts, but it is often useful for fairly simple pages, as it gets rid of any unwanted cruft.
All the best,
Keith
I’ve encountered this before, and there are a couple of things that I’ve found that can get you the information without the webkit mangling to distract you:
First is Safari’s “Reader” feature. If it appears in your address bar, it allows you to see a clean version of a web page, often without advertisements. You can print this view to PDF and add that to your research folder. If the Reader isn’t available for a page, then just going straight to the print dialogue allows you to capture the page as a pdf, mostly intact (some layouts and embedded videos sometimes look odd), which can be preferable to a webarchive. I think the pdfs also keep hyperlinks active (though don’t quote me on that… I don’t have one handy to check).
Since Scrivener adds a pdf option to send the output directly to your front-most project, it’s almost as easy as dragging the URL to the research folder.
Sorry, I didn’t notice the further replies. I’ve been looking at Devon actually - looks great. However, I’m happy now with the existing set up. Scrivener is tremendous! 