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18 points

Does this work with any text on page (vs just inputs)?

Currently dealing with several digital textbooks - that I fucking purchased - from Elsevier that disable copy functions, which makes pulling chunks of text from a page to take notes a pain in the ass. I’ve resorted to just using the snipit tool to capture tiny screenshots of the text I want, but that’s ofc significantly less ideal than just highlighting text and hitting Ctrl+C.

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21 points

There is a Firefox extension called Absolute Enable Right Click & Copy that works great for a lot sites that block you from being able to copy.

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4 points

That sounds right up my alley because another pet peeve of mine is when they block me from opening an image in a new tab via the right click menu. My eyes aren’t what they used to be and I need to ZOOM sometimes.

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2 points

Link for the lazy: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/absolute-enable-right-click/

It’s a really good extension. Has a tendency to break some functionality of websites when it’s on, but it’s easy to just toggle it on, refresh the page, grab what you need, then toggle it off again.

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9 points

If you’re using Windows, there is a utility included in PowerToys that you might find useful to get the text from those screenshots: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/text-extractor

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2 points

Okay that actually sounds pretty amazing… but I can’t get it to work. Win+shift+T seems to just cycle through the icons pinned in my taskbar. I’ll do some googling to see if I can figure out why that is, but if you know a quick fix, then yes please!!

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2 points

ShareX has an OCR feature. It’s a tool for taking screenshots and recordings, with support for configurable workflows which can do all sorts, including extract text from the snipped area and copy it to the clipboard.

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1 point

I just thought of a possible bypass. Maybe a phone’s “scan document” function can help with that? Provided that the text is clear, you may be able to scan a webpage and save it as a scanned document. Then open the doc on your phone (or other device), and you should be able to highlight and copy the scanned text.

Okay, maybe not. I tested it with this very page and although the copied text got the gist, I still would’ve had to go back and edit things. But eh, YMMV. It could be a valid work-around for somebody, just with different text or using a different device.

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2 points

Usually I just leave them as little image blocks of text cuz ain’t nobody got time for dat. When I actually do want to fully convert it (usually only bother if I’m sending something out to the class), then I’ll save the whole doc as a PDF and then run it through an optical character recognition service like this one. There are ways, they just suck when a feature like copy exists.

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1 point

I find that pressing Ctrl+C while highlighting the text (still holding left click) works, at least with Cengage

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-1 points

Screenshot, paste to GPT and ask it to parse to text.

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Microblog Memes

!microblogmemes@lemmy.world

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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, Twitter X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

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