knowledge Nugget - Copy paste from websites

How to copy / paste from difficult web pages?

Generally when I spot an interesting story or news item to be circulated among friends in my groups, I do a select, copy & paste job. Before sending an email of the story, I prefer removing pictures, advertisements and giving a clean "text only" copy in a comfortable font size. I make sure that the complete URL linking to the original source is always included. Some websites will prevent you from doing a select, copy and paste operation. For example when you try Times of India newspaper, it will allow you to do 'copy and paste' but the end result will be just a link to the web page! This is frustrating. 

To circumvent TOI from preventing me copy / paste, I have a browser plugin called "Enable Right Click". On any page where websites prevent me from copy paste I use this plugin. 

Often a website may present advertisements that will obscure the main text. In order to remove all unwanted extras and read only the main text I use another browser plugin called "Just Read". Plain text is presented to you in a new window. You can do a select copy and paste operation from here. 

In the case of images / photos / pdf files copy / paste may not work. Selecting the text part may be difficult. In such cases I use "Snipping tool" to select a portion of the screen to be converted to an image (jpg) and saved on my disk. 

Most tricky and treacherous to handle web pages come from the Express group of publications.   I am calling them treacherous because, even a careless mouse over some unwanted space on your screen will lead you to some useless advertiser. There are still a few websites that I haven't figured out how to tackle them. More, as I learn. For now, bye. 

Dr P Vyasamoorthy
30 Gruhalakshmi colony Secunderabad 500015
040-29552016 / 09490804278 / 8179386472

Confidence and stupidity are a very dangerous combination, but they often go together.