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I've been printing to PDF for decades now, and nothing comes close to the ease of use and versatility of 2 decades worth of interesting web pages .. I have pret
by fit2rule 7y ago
I've been printing to PDF for decades now, and nothing comes close to the ease of use and versatility of 2 decades worth of interesting web pages .. I have pretty much every interesting article, including many from HN, from decades of this habit.
Need to find all articles relating to 'widget'?
$ ls -l ~/PDFArchive/ | grep -i widget
This has proven so valuable, time and again .. there is a great joy in not having to maintain bookmarks, and in being able to copy the whole directory content to other machines for processing/reference .. and then there's the whole pdf->text situation, which has its thorns truly (some website content is buried in masses of ad-noise), but also has huge advantage - there's a lot of data to be mined from 50,000 PDF files ..
Therefore, I'd quite like to know, what does monolith have to offer over this method? I can imagine that its useful to have all the scripting content packaged up and bundled into a single .html file - but does it still work/run? (This can be either a pro or a con in my opinion..)
- flatroze 7y agoI'd say since monolith produces a plaintext document it lets you edit things easier if needed. JS can be removed from the final document using the -j flag. HTML Files can also be grepped for content, unlike PDFs.
- dredmorbius 7y agoHaving gone this route in part myself, advantages of HTML or other more-structured file formats, if there is appropriate metadata markup: - Allow for recording source and author information (PDF ... doesn't always provide this). - Allows for full-text search. - Allows for editing out annoyances. I'll frequently go from HTML to some simplified representation (e.g., Markdown), and then re-generate formats that are useful elsewhere: HTML, PDF, ePub, etc. Dumping from HTML to Markdown frequently makes cruft-removal far simpler, and the principle content of most pages is text. In rare instances, images are useful, and even more rarely, any multimedia content (video, audio, programmatic content). What's depressing is the number of sites which screw with even basic HTML. E.g., the NY Times rarely use HTML tables for tabular representation, and instead use a homebrew combination of custom markup, CSS, and JS to much the same effect. Pretty, in situ, but brittle and transports exceedingly poorly. That's just one of many such cases.
- mxuribe 7y agoIts funny, on a rare occasion, I too have saved some content as a PDF - more so for archiving rather than for offline viewing...But i guess i never thought to scale it for all/most of my bookmarks. It seems so obvious now after reading your comment. However, my experience with PDFs has been negative. From filesize to slow booting of myriad pdf viewers, etc., it just seems like viewing stuff in native html, text is better - at least for what I've experienced. Further, my preferred browser - firefox - leaves much to be desired in this arena of generating proper PDFs, and i end up switching to chrome (bleh!) just to "PDF something" that i saw/read online. Again, this function in firefox is not something that i use as often, hence why i stick with FF, and not gone back to chrome. However, going back to your approach....I wonder if i can use a tool - either like this monolith or singlefile, or even pupeteer, etc. - to snapshot web content, but save it into html instead of pdf. I would guess html content is still grep-able (as you noted for your PDF local searches). Hmmm...a local cache of my own offline bookmarks...Hmmm, interesting. Thank you for this inspiration!!