Why does it return .zip that needs to be unpacked? To save bandwidth your could just use gzip 'Content-Encoding' end return the format requested by the user, which would be unpacked by the browser.
Returned file name is [documentcyborg.com].zip, it would be nicer if the domain of the requested document was used instead.
For zip file it is not just to save bandwidth, it is also to save disk space as we don't know yet how many user will use it, we preferred to be cautious but in the future you are right we can give straight the file once we know how much disk space will be needed to sustain it.
For the returned document name, this is up to discussion if a lot of user ask for it we will change it.
Thanks for using the apps and for your comment.
As a user, if I ask for a DOC I want a DOC. If your service gives me a zip, it's not what I asked for. As a programmer, this is quite simple to solve as others have said how (store gzipped and serve with correct headers).
I do conversions like this as part of an app, and I never save to disk - I create the file in memory, and return it directly to the HTTP response as a file download. What stack are you running that makes you save to disk? (Because that also would be a deal-breaker for using this on confidential documents, if you ever allow uploads)
The title of the article is the name of document, we understand that this is misleading so we can add it at the top of the document.
For the Tweet, this is up for discussion for the moment our parser remove Media Card, we could add an option to enable or disable Media Card.
For the picture this is an improvement we could do easily.
Actually we do not know what document you generate, but I understand the need for end to end privacy for such product.
Thanks for your comment and for using the app.
We found some bug in the rtf and txt export, we are fixing them right now.
We are going to change the way we serve the file either as user mixedbit suggested it or other that work for sure cross browser and trough proxy and so on. Thanks for the report.
:) This would defeat the whole point of the apps, think of it like editable "instapaper", would you put documentcyborg.com in your instapaper? But otherwise smart choice of URL:)
If can please send us just the domain name that failed at: hn at documentcyborg.com , we will fix all the problem that you encountered on theses domain.
1) the zipped download has always the same name, becomes quickly confusing if you're grabbing several pages. Maybe adding a timestamp or, better, a title snippet could help.
1) Understood, for the moment we have not yet decied which way we go but for sure we will stop giving only [documentcyborg.com].zip file
2) We found some bug in the export to rtf and txt (its getting fix), the other export are working correctly.
For the Instataper pages that fail if you could send us some domain name you wish : hn at documentcyborg.com and we will test the parser against it to make sure it works.
1. Externally-provided content is dangerous. You might use a hash of the domain name, but I'd avoid files named after the sources.
2. Metadata such as a date would be useful.
3. Despite 1, a highly-sanitised hostname could be informative. An iconv to 8-bit ASCII [-a-zA-Z0-9_], and not allowing the first character to be '-' might be a start. Put a length limit on that as well.
Thanks, for 1) this is based on extraction not source so very easy to mitigate, 2)right we can include it in the filename.3)we have include most of it in the new updated version online. Thank you very much for your report.
That hostname is very difficult to read. I kept squinting and though it was "Documentcy Borg". If you're going to put together something like you need a shorter, catchier name.
Here's a freebie name that's (as of writing this) unregistered: page2doc.com
Unfortunately our boss The Cyborg doesn't want us to change the name. As his minions we can't do much but if we escape we promise to free Document from the Cyborg:)
Please can you tell which browser are you using, this should happen only if you disabled javascript or try to change the parameter type of the export. If that's neither your case we will trow one of our programmer to the tiger:)
Alright, I'm dumb. It was my JavaScript blocker. It works once I disabled it.
Nice service. Only advice I can give is to tweak the typography a bit for the PDF output: I'd restrict the measure (line lengths) to around sixty characters, and boost the leading (space between lines) to about 1.5 times the line-height. Personally, I'd make the body text a bit smaller too, but the bigger text might be preferred by some.
Great to hear, we will better communicate on the error to ask for people to enable javascript.
For the pdf output, we will look into it as it is a complex issue if you have for example mixed content non latin character with latin character. Thanks for the feedback.
We will fix the error message to ask for people to enable javascript. And now because you ask for it we throw one to the tiger, now let's hope we have enough programmers:)
When i tried it with itself i got "We couldn't find any text for creating the document. Please send us the problematic link : https://documentcyborg.com/ via our contactus form."
Feature Suggestion: single-page pdfs that look like in the browser. (basicly like the result of a fireshot screenshot in a pdf, but keeping the text as text, not an image)
https://fprin.tf does that, but... "this service is still in beta and probably not ready for production use yet" and it doesn't seem to target the same users as https://documentcyborg.com
I don't understand what is the advantage of server side processing. I have always depended on Evernote Clearly and Redability mobilizer to turn any web page into nice text which can be copied and pasted on MS Word. Then I can use Prince (http://www.princexml.com/) to batch convert docx into whatever I want.
If someone finds it slow then they can enable auto capture clipboard.
press ctrl+` to enable Clearly, ctrl+A to select all text, ctrl+C to send it to clipboard.
I wish if someone can work on this to make it smother for a desktop users.
PS: I also make use of reading view mode of Firefox.
Great tool, but reddit threads with a lot of comments only fetches the first one. I know it's quite hard with the child comments and the number of them, but I really wish there's a way to take them offline for me to read.
I use the DuckDuckGo bang !pf to convert webpages into PDFs (got the tip from here: http://duckgobang.com) but your tool converts to multiple file formats which is even better.
We don't just convert to other format we try to extract the meaningful content only and not the whole page. Thank you very much for your positive comment.
This is a useful service. However, I picked the first link on medium.com and the PDF conversion didn't go that well. The layout of some of text gets messed up.
The layout for doc,odt,epub,rtf,txt is as good as the medium article, for the pdf you are right, we are fixing our pdf renderer to not overflow element right now. Will keep you updated once done.
Nice UI, but it doesn't work in my case. I've tried a bunch of urls from stackexchange and the output is not readable (not properly formatted). But anyway, what I suggest to do is to add feature that I'm looking for (and maybe not only me?) is to convert website to some kind of book, for example in pdf. As I remember Adobe PDF has this functionality included, but I 'm not aware of any web app that can do this. So, basically you can parse whole website and create book out of it. So, anyway good luck!
We tried several stackexchange url and it did work, for example : http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/92138/the-letter... which has a complicated layout, generate an epub or anything else and you will see the quality is good, we agree that the pdf renderer is not as good as the other yet but we are working on it. If you pls send us at hn at documentcyborg.com or via comment here on hn the link that didn't work so we can get better that would be great. For the book idea the problem is when to stop, if you make a book out of amazon it will take years. Maybe the possibility to add several url and from that generate a "book" document. Thanks for trying the apps, we just wished it was up to your standard but we are constantly improving it since 3 day ago when we launched, so hopefully we will get there soon.
For example I've tried this one: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/102555/automatically-.... Only question text saved into document.
As for the book from urls, there could be some options how deep to scan urls, only from current page or all subpage, etc.
OK understood, for the moment we get only the main content, we are working on a new "parser"that can fetch the main content and comment attached to it. For this you are right we don't extract content but we expect to have this released soon. For the book you are right, we will think about it and how to integrate it. Thanks for the feedback, this is greatly appreciated.
While you're at it, why not throw in the conversion to a few (popular) image formats as well? I can think of (at least) some scenarios where that would come in quite handy (e.g. posting long articles to Twitter).
Nice to hear, we are thinking about adding image export and also markdown export. We are awaiting more feedback regarding those two and based on that we will move forward. Thanks for your comment.
76 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadWhy does it return .zip that needs to be unpacked? To save bandwidth your could just use gzip 'Content-Encoding' end return the format requested by the user, which would be unpacked by the browser.
Returned file name is [documentcyborg.com].zip, it would be nicer if the domain of the requested document was used instead.
Not bad but the title of the article is missing.
The tweet is missing too but I can't decide if it's a good or a bad thing.
There should be options to remove pictures too I think.
Honestly I'd be interested by a standalone product like this. I don't like the fact that you know everything I store.
Later I tried a text export of the same page, some HTML remains (</div> elements).
Using the title of the page to name the zip would be nice too.
>We couldn't find any text for creating the document. Please send us the problematic link : https://documentcyborg.com/ via our contactus form.
This was the first page I thought to try it on, so you might want to consider adding more text to your landing page so that it will work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/50neqc/will_future_u...
2) found html tags and incorrect whitespace when exporting to TXT this page: https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning
I want to try this tool with pages that Instapaper fails to grab.
For the Instataper pages that fail if you could send us some domain name you wish : hn at documentcyborg.com and we will test the parser against it to make sure it works.
1. Externally-provided content is dangerous. You might use a hash of the domain name, but I'd avoid files named after the sources.
2. Metadata such as a date would be useful.
3. Despite 1, a highly-sanitised hostname could be informative. An iconv to 8-bit ASCII [-a-zA-Z0-9_], and not allowing the first character to be '-' might be a start. Put a length limit on that as well.
Here's a freebie name that's (as of writing this) unregistered: page2doc.com
Nice service. Only advice I can give is to tweak the typography a bit for the PDF output: I'd restrict the measure (line lengths) to around sixty characters, and boost the leading (space between lines) to about 1.5 times the line-height. Personally, I'd make the body text a bit smaller too, but the bigger text might be preferred by some.
other wise nice tool, thx
Interesting idea though.
It seems to search for the largest body of text and omit the rest.
Great for offlineish portfolios.
In some ways, Oh By[1] performs the exact opposite role. Which is to say, Oh By allows you to transform any document into a web page.
Well, any document 4096 characters or shorter ...
[1] https://0x.co
I don't understand what is the advantage of server side processing. I have always depended on Evernote Clearly and Redability mobilizer to turn any web page into nice text which can be copied and pasted on MS Word. Then I can use Prince (http://www.princexml.com/) to batch convert docx into whatever I want. If someone finds it slow then they can enable auto capture clipboard. press ctrl+` to enable Clearly, ctrl+A to select all text, ctrl+C to send it to clipboard.
I wish if someone can work on this to make it smother for a desktop users.
PS: I also make use of reading view mode of Firefox.
https://medium.com/@subes01/this-is-your-life-in-silicon-val...
While you're at it, why not throw in the conversion to a few (popular) image formats as well? I can think of (at least) some scenarios where that would come in quite handy (e.g. posting long articles to Twitter).
All the best moving forward.