Not able to copy from a webpage

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Once upon a time! I could highlight text on a web page and right click and press ‘copy’ and transfer it to Word for my later reading/use etc. Modern technology has moved in and on some sites I cannot do this now – nor ‘Save picture as’.

Does any body know of software that will allow me to do this?

Cheers,
Olleym

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Some websites don’t allow you to do this but you can still usually print them out – but if you want to save them to read/reference later, then why not just bookmark them or copy and save their URLs in a WordPad doc ?

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I do this already, but it does not allow to extract certian pieces pf writing or pictures. As a saved page I am in the same position as if it was live.
Thanks for the response though,

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Since I don’t know the specifics of this particular web page I will shoot my mouth off and give a general idea.

If you can save the page as a “.htm” or a “.mht”, then it seems to me that you have already saved the text. Just open the saved page in Notepad and edit out everything except what you want to keep.

As for a picture, either a screen clipping or look in the “.mht” file for the UU or Mime-encoded portions and find some little UU or Mime-decoding app somewhere.

There is always a way.

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This might be of interest.

On pages which don’t allow downloading of images, I have found that displaying the source will often reveal a url at which the desired image is hosted. It takes a bit of patience trawling through the code but it often works.

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You can also, in IE at least, go to file, select “save as”, and choose “web page complete”.
Then select your download location.
But it’s not as neat as it used to be, especially with all the bells and whistle crap that web pages
have become.

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I use Firefox and can do the same with it, but it does not give me access to parts of the page I want to copy.
Thanks for responding.

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Text is more difficult to get in an editable form but you are or should be able to save a page in image format and then open that in any decent image program and cut out what you want, and if it will fit on the screen, just press the PrtScr key and paste the clipboard contents as a new image in said same image program and crop out what you want if needed.

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Also had the same problem. Now use a an extension PrintEdit https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/print-edit/ which allows you to strip away parts of a live webpage and print the balance. I use a virtual PDF printer to create the PDF file.

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Also had the same problem. I use FireFox with the extension PrintEdit https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/print-edit/ which allows you to strip away parts of a live webpage and print the balance. I use a virtual PDF printer to create the PDF file.

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Use the Windows ‘snipping’ tool, and paste the image straight into the Word doc. Just as quick as highlighting the text, and you get to keep everything on the page. Multiple images into the same Word doc can be used when the article is long.

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Thanks CloudCatcher, I’ve seen the snipping tool but never used it. It looks easier to use than prtscn! Where’s the Thanks button when it’s deserved!

BTW How do you catch clouds (speaking as a retired meteorologist)?

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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You can also print to an XPS document. You should be able to copy from there.

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I copy/paste the text I want into notepad, which strips all formatting, then copy/paste into Word, where I edit as necessary

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There are two very effective ways to do this that I use:

1. If you use Mozilla Firefox, there is an add-on called “Print Pages to PDF” that is VERY effective at producing a highly accurate PDF file of any or all tabs that you have open. All other such add-ons that I’ve tried were inaccurate at producing PDF files. That’s why, with 190 reviews, this add-on is a solid 5 out of 5 stars. Get it here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/print-pages-to-pdf/?src=search

2. “Readability” also does a great job. What it does is get rid of all the ads and presents a clean web page of just the material of interest which is then simple to save directly to a file or produce a PDF using #1 above. You can read about it here: https://www.readability.com/
I like using their “Bookmarklets” which allows you to save the page for future reading. Read about that here:
https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

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Print to PDF is awesome but if you try to copy and paste every letter is separated by spaces. Ctrl H can eliminate the spaces but the letters are then one continuous string. Is there an elegant solution to this?

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Two suggestions I haven’t seen mentioned: Instapaper, whose description indicates it is exactly what you want or Evernote. I’ve not used Instapaper much, but I use Evernote all the time to clip hockey articles which are sometimes fleeting.

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Print to a pdf. It is easier to copy into a Word document this way, and if that doesn’t work, at least you have a good copy of what you are looking for.

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Hi Olleym, How goes it Down Under?

Since webpage construction has become more complex, what you can now copy, and how, really depends on just how hard the Website designer intends to thwart you.

Flash based sites or flash page elements are the most difficult. There are a few Flash copying tools out there and you can even go searching for the downloaded flash files in Temporary Internet – so yes Flash can be copied but mostly it’s not worth the effort.

Thankfully, 95% of websites are still ‘Normal’ and you can usually copy and paste into something like Word etc. Unfortunately the incompatibilities between webpage and Word document formatting often results in a bit of a midgemodge, but these two simple tools below will mostly get you a cleaner version of what you really want.

Win32pad: Allows text only (similarly to Windows NotePad) it strips the formatting off a Copy and Paste of the page but has the advantage of allowing clickable links, which is useful for you to record just where the webpage you copied it off lives. Very useful tool for assembling edited notes from multi-page research. Best set the default font to something like ‘Times New Roman’. IMHO easily the best of the NotePad replacements.

FastStone Capture: Basically an on screen ‘camera’ that can take snapshots (.jpg, .png etc) of all or part of what is showing on your screen. It also contains a great little editor to add arrows, text and captions to your screenshots. Faststone can copy static Flash images and can even be set to snapshot a full scrolled page. I’ve tried most other ‘snip’ tools but this one does it best for me. The last freeware version (FastStone v5.3) even works in Win8 and is still available here (wait for the save box):
http://www.oldapps.com/fast_stone_capture.php?old_fscapture=17?download

From the text and image output of those two simple tools you can easily compile neat representations of webpage content into Word documents or emails.

Have fun, Chris

P.S. I’ve noticed recently that a few websites are trying to fool you into thinking you cannot select the text – look carefully and you’ll see it has been highlighted but in a very pale pastel colour.

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There is a Chrome extensiion and a Firefox addon that put a link in a password protected website that you can come back to and find the name of the article and the link. It’s called Instapaper. It has two functions “Read Later” and “instapaper”. The first will save your page link. Just so you don”t panic, in Chrome your screen goes black and “Saved” shows up. The second will take you to a login page after which you will see all your saved pages. You just click on them to open.
Instapaper works really well and you can a paid version (really cheap) to store more links. You can email a link to someone from you screen and make folders for filing your link. All told it’s an amazing app for little money.

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Yes: Instapaper will be perfect for you if you have an iPhone or iPad. I use it a great deal when traveling, so I can read Web articles on the plane without a connection. When you’re on a page you want to read later, you just hit the “Send” icon and an Instapaper button appears as an additional option to Message or Email. Save as many as you want. Later, you open the Instapaper app and all of your saved articles appear in a list. Tap one and the article comes up, stripped of all ads. The layout is so good it’s actually much easier to read than the original.

One tip that will save you some disappointment: After you “save” all the articles, you have to launch the Instapaper app. That’s when the real saving occurs. It takes a minute or two depending on your connection and how many articles you saved.

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You an also highlight the text, and then right click and select translate to Bing. then C/P that into what ever you want. I use this method all of the time in Facebook to copy recipes.

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What about Evernote? I see that KimScoop13 has also mentioned this. I have found this to be a very effective way to grab content from Internet Explorer and have it in a form that is useful afterwards. Making an image of material means that links are not active.

I still use the free version of Evernote.

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Yes you can do that also I also use OneNote and C/P either with the method I mentioned or will also OneNote’s Clipper

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While it may be overkill for the small stuff, you ought to check out HTTrack. The following is from http://www.httrack.com/:

“HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.

WinHTTrack is the Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Seven release of HTTrack, and WebHTTrack the Linux/Unix/BSD release. See the download page.”

:):

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I’ve used Syncopator’s suggestion, “display source”, or I’ve taken a screen shot (editing it down with Irfanview if necessary) and run it through an optical character recognition when I wanted to use the actual text.

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For those of you still using copy and paste to notepad to remove formatting, PureText 3.0 is a much simpler option. http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/ You can set it up so that any key combination you chose will be used for “Pure Text” pasting. So I have mine setup so that CRTL-C is copy, CTRL-V is standard windows Paste, Windowskey-V is PureText Paste. With a Puretext Paste all formatting is removed and only Pure Text is pasted, so formatting will match the location where you are pasting the text to.

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Another vote for Evernote.

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Once upon a time! I could highlight text on a web page and right click and press ‘copy’ and transfer it to Word for my later reading/use etc. Modern technology has moved in and on some sites I cannot do this now – nor ‘Save picture as’.
Does any body know of software that will allow me to do this?
Cheers,
Olleym

As already mentioned Evernote “CLEARLY” is a good add-on for Firefox that strips out most of the junk, AND seems to remove any right-click prohibitions allowing both text to be copied and images to be saved. Install it and run from the right-click menu, then copy and save away.

https://addons.mozilla.org/bn-bd/firefox/addon/clearly/

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Lots of great tips here but some miss the point. Saving the entire web page will also save the script that blocks copy-pasting of sections. They just want a snippet. Evernote doesn’t work if you can’t copy the snippet.

Firefox has a plugin called RightToClick. This turns off the JS and allows selecting text and saving pictures.

I also sometimes use the suggested PrintEdit for sites that don’t have a decent print stylesheet.
PrintPDF is useful for that, also mentioned.
Mozilla Archive Format allows you to save web pages in Mhtl, mht, or MAFF- in other words a single file. This is very useful for saving all of it. (all are forms of zip) But again, that will include the script.

Finally I’ll note a PC application called GetPlainText. This just sits on your taskbar. When you copy some text, rather than coping it into and out of Notepad, just click the icon and it strips the formatting out of the text in the clipboard. Just one click. Very useful for moving text Out of Word and emails too, such as in web design.

Finally, a related plugin you may find useful – Thumbnail Zoom Plus. Roll your mouse over an image on a web page and it blows it up to full size.

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Sometimes I am able to highlight text, but cannot right-click > copy. Then I remember what I always used to use…ctrl-c. Usually I can paste. It doesn’t always work, but a lot of younger designers may not know or remember that there is a ctrl-c, and don’t plan against it. Ctrl-c is the easiest for me, so I always try it first.

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Might be old tech but sometimes the old ways are the best

Just printscreen it then pull it through a good ocr package.

I use textbridge pro – old but useful when these things come along to frustrate.

Snippy as the cutting tool for Windows XP if you dont have windows 7 snipping tool is also handy.

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Here’s a different suggestion. Use Chrome browser and get the extension (i.e. browser add-on) called Awesome Screenshot. This extension allows you to capture an “entire webpage”, no matter how long it is, with a single-click on the Awesome dropdown menu. Then click on “Done” and save it to your desired folder. Very simple.

Or, click the menu to capture just the “visible part of the page”.

Or, click to capture a “selected area” then click & drag your mouse pointer over the desired area.

Once captured, you may highlight or circle any chosen text or area and you can even annotate with arrows and add your own text/notes if desired.

Then click done. and save it to your desired folder. Again, very easy.

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One more suggestion is Pocket (formerly Read It Later). You can save pages to a reading list to read when you have time. It also has an offline reading mode that lets you read the items you’ve saved even without a network connection.
Pocket is available as an add-on to browsers (I have it in my Firefox) and to Android and iPad/iPhone devices. Here is it’s homepage: https://getpocket.com/

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Hi everyone,
thanks for all the responses.

A lot of new stuff for me and some successful answers. Many suggestions were not appropriate for what I was looking for and some were complicated for me.
I have found the text answer with ‘Clearly’. It lets me do an easy copy with outthe need to format and will even include picture in the text. For pictures I will use Microsoft Snipping Tool. Simple and with a choice of what to save as. I kicked myself for forgetting about going to the page source and copying the html, but it does have some formatting work which is bypassed with ‘Clearly”

So a big thanks to all who responded and I am pleased thatmy query seemed to have been useful to more than just myself.:)

Cheers,
Olleym.

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Try printliminator.
“The Printliminator is a bookmarklet with some simple tools you can use to make websites print better. One click to activate, and then click to remove elements from the page, remove graphics, and apply better print styling.”
See http://www.css-tricks.com/examples/ThePrintliminator/. I couldn’t find it via Firefox/Tools/Adons.

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Hi Olleym,
Since you are already indoctrinated in the Microsoft Office system, and since OneNote is an OS-agnostic utility/app and a FREEware; I would recommend you its use above all others.
To become a true file-nerd with OneNote, you can create separate Notebook/Group/Section and multiple dedicated Pages under them and keep adding new website snippets as your “Things To Read (T2R)”.
And if you have OneNote properly setup, when you copy/paste to OneNote (even a single line of a website), it normally adds an end line to paste action that tells you the exact webpage it was copied from, so you can single click back to that website page, directly. Like so:

…Is there an elegant solution to this? …
Pasted from

If you prefer NOT to use OneNote, you can probably handle this task by creating a special BookMarks/Favorites in your browser (FF/IE) folder named “T2R” and simply drag/drop the web address into this folder as you need to. For extra credit, you can right-click the ‘Properties’ of this newly created BookMark/Favorite and give it a proper title and maybe even a date code (such as “20140702_WindowsSecretsForum-CopyWebpage“) for easier future retrieval if your T2R folder starts backing up.

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Clipcashe Pro which attaches to your right click options. Seems to copy anything. Been using it over 50 years. Jim

http://www.xrayz.co.uk/download/clipcache

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Clipcashe Pro which attaches to your right click options. Seems to copy anything. Been using it over 50 years. Jim

http://www.xrayz.co.uk/download/clipcache

15 perhaps, not 50.

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If you use the Reading View in the IE 11 Metro Browser of Windows 8, all unnecessary images, ads side columns etc. will be removed. You can then select the complete page with Ctrl-A and send it OneNote, Evernote, email etc. with the Share Charm. You can also paste it in Word. My Two Bits from a Windows 8.1 user.

See My Blog at http://dnyankosh.wordpress.com/ for useful tips on Windows 8

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