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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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