I would love the ability to clip a webpage and save it to Margninnote 3 on iOS or Mac. Right now, I can save a PDF, but it would be really nice if I could save a .webarchive instead.
Bumping this on the anniversary of my initial post because it’s a feature I would still really love, and there are a lot more users in the forum now than there were a year ago!
I would love webarchive support in Marginnote 3!
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+1 I would really really want this feature as well!
I’m an Evernote user and a Margin note user. As Evernote is focusing less on individual customers and more on enterprise customers, I’m considering move away from Evernote. I’m aware of the download HTML feature of MarginNote 3, but it’s not as handy as the web clipper tool. It’s a deal breaker feature for me.
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Hello,
Sorry for the late reply. I wonder how many MN3 users both use Devonthink 
. I fully agree that web clipper is a useful tool, but I’m sorry that MN3 merely support import ePub, MOV, MP4, MP3, M4A, M4V and PDF format.
So it may be difficult for the developer to change these code. But I will tell the idea to developer-min, hoping this feature will be added in MarginNote 4.
Regards,
Bryan
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Hi
I very much agree with the suggestion that Marginnote definitely lacks a web clipper for Mac (and possibly ios)
I also use Devonthink 3 and probably their web clipper was difficult to develop.
Also I had dropped Evernote for DT3 but Evernote really had a great webclipper.
I wonder if anything could be done by Margin Note team for a V4 that really is imho a major lack / caveat.
Thank you !
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Something I do that (kind of) acts like a web-clipper with MarginNote is by saving PDF webpages to a subdirectory in /Library/Containers/QReader.MarginStudyMac/Data/Documents/ using DEVONthink’s browser extension. While not a .webarchive, the extension leverages Apple’s WebKit rendering engine, which I have found to be surprisingly faithful to original webpage renders. Unless you need to take notes on webpages whose dynamic content (like JavaScript) is critical to the notes themselves (which I think is unlikely), it should work for 99% of note-taking use cases.
The process of “clipping” (saving) the webpage to the directory is quick, but it does often require opening MarginNote multiple times in order for the PDF to be inserted into MarginNote’s SQLite database and listed in MarginNote’s file browser.*
*On that note, I hope future versions of MarginNote will have real-time database updates so that restarting the app isn’t necessary to view newly created files. @Edward_Support-Team @Sushi_Support-Team, is something like this in the works?
Over two years after my original feature request, this is still my greatest frustration with MarginNote: finding ways to get web pages into the same research system as my PDFs. I’d be happy with webarchive support or a nice PDF conversion system.
I have also been looking for a good web clipping solution.
Could you say a little more about the specific functionality you’d like?
MarginNote already has a way to save web pages as PDF files. What features of a webarchive would you like that web-page-as-PDF is lacking?
I can see a clear use case for a way to simply clip some text from a web page and somehow add it to the MN database with a URL to the source (note sure of the best form to save it, though). Saving the entire web page or saving it as a PDF file may not be desirable. In any case, I’m curious to hear the specific use case you’d like to see.
Personally, I have not seriously considered MarginNote as a system to manage web clippings, because its support for document management is very weak. We customers have been asking the MarginNote team to address the issues with document management for at least a year now, but I haven’t yet seen a statement from them about what will be done and no timeframe for any decisions has been offered.
Given the lack of any clear commitment from the MarginNote team, I’ve been investigating other apps.
.webarchives include all the HTML/CSS/Javascript to render the page fluidly, so that text size and layout is maintained (similar to Epub, which MN3 already supports). I would be satisfied with this pretty simple implementation.
A smarter web clipper would make decisions about what parts of the page can be left out, such as site navigation menus or display ads.
The current web saving system just uses the system’s built-in print-to-PDF feature. It doesn’t do anything smart on its own.
I have around 70 or so PDFs in MarginNote, and I’ve never had a problem with organization. I use categories exclusively, no folders. It’s very simple and reliable.
DEVONthink Pro provides excellent web clipping features, and enables you to chose what file format you can use to save the clippings. I often save files as PDFs so that I can annotate them, but…we’ve already discussed the problems with MN’s organizational structure for folder / categories, ad nauseam…
@davemacdo, thanks for elaborating. I’m not an engineer and I can’t speak for the MN team, but my general understanding is that to display and annotate a webarchive inside MN, it would be necessary to use a code framework like WebKit, and then make all the existing MN annotation support work with that. It’s probably do-able, but it strikes me as a non-trivial task. Again, I’m not an engineer, but WebKit is a fairly complicated framework. AFAICT, there isn’t support for rendering HTML in the current version of MN. The notecards seem to use a combination of markdown and RTF internally.
If you simply want the ability to attach existing webarchives to notecards, that’s probably much more do-able. MN could copy the webarchive files to the internal folder that is used for PDF files, and maintain links to them. It would then be possible to open an attached/saved webarchive in your preferred browser. MarginNote could be used to manage the webarchives with categories, as you suggest. I think this is roughly how Bookends handles webarchives. If you haven’t already had a look, Bookends is a really excellent app. It’s primarily a reference manager, but has pretty good support for PDFs and file attachments (e.g., webarchive files), too.
Towards your original point, it would also be helpful if MarginNote provided better support for x-callback-url. This is a scheme for inter-application services on iOS, but it is used by many macOS apps as well. MarginNote can respond to requests to display existing notes via URLs, but AFAICT not to x-callback-urls. It would be good if notes could be added via an x-callback-url, or, in the case of your request, that webarchives could be added/attached to MN.
By using x-callback-urls, workflows on iOS, and services on macOS, it would be possible to create a pretty good web clipper. I have done this for the Bear notes app, which is possible because Bear has good support for x-callback-url.
So, my first request would be that MarginNote add support for x-callback-urls, as a step towards the ability to receive and add clippings (could just be text, but could be webarchives, etc.). Specifying the “destination” for these clippings inside MN is something I’m not clear about, but I imagine it would not be difficult to come up with a workable solution.
MN already responds to a URL scheme (i.e., marginnote3app://) in a limited fashion, and somebody did some work on openURL for MN, but it’s unclear to me what that really does and how to make it work. Parenthetically, the whole area of MN plugins still feels quite vague to me. Even the nomenclature is vague. Are we talking about “plugins” or “add-ons” or “extensions” or… ? Are they the same? What’s supported, exactly? When do we get completed documentation in English? Etc.
In short, all the usual unanswered questions.
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As I understand, the WebArchive format is deprecated so no longer recommended as a format, even by the folks at DEVONthink.
See the status of WebArchive on the left column of this link: Apple Developer Documentation
I use DEVONthink and a long time ago, I too would clip items from the web using WebArchive format. I no longer do that, having realized that it’s generally the text (and some pictures) that I’m interested in so I use Formatted Note format in DEVONthink (or MarkDown).
Also see think forum discussion over at DEVONthink:
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Why not use the PDF format, esp. since it allows you to annotate in MarginNote?
That would be great, but a webclipper would improve the conversion over a normal print-to-PDF operation from Safari. Webclippers intelligently parse a page to remove certain things that won’t be meaningful in another context, like the site navigation UI or display ads. A webclipper would also make better decisions about how to handle challenging situations like tables that don’t tend to do well when printing.
They have that feature in DEVONthink Pro.