4 Ways To Copy Text From Copy/Text Protected Websites Or Right Click Disabled Websites

How To Copy Text From Copy/Text Protected Websites Or Right Click Disabled Websites

Get text from copy protected websites/ any text on the screen through OCR and other ways

Time is the most precious thing in the world. One cannot buy an extra second with money. So whatever work we do, we should do it faster. If we want some information, we should get it in the shortest period of time. If we found something useful, we should be allowed to save it for later use and access  it without delay. Only then, the information  have value in being beneficial to the needy. We feel that the data presented for public use have the freedom to save for later use. Since there are several methods to copy text/ image from websites, disabling right clicking or making the website copy/ print protected do not restrict a greedy one from stealing the data and use somewhere else as theirs; instead block the access to legitimate users like students, researchers and other needy people who can best utilize the content without spending much of their precious time.

The websites that prevent copying of data may present you with a message -“you are not allowed to copy content or view source” – as shown below.

Here we provide some of the easiest ways to copy text from copy protected/ right click disabled websites displayed in Chrome/ Firefox browsers. One of the methods help you to extract text from anything displayed on your screen from any application.

1. Copy using http://www.allowcopy.com

   Allowcopy.com is the simplest solution. Just copy the website address (url) of the website in the input box in the website http://www.allowcopy.com and click on submit.
   
   Allowcopy.com will open the same site as it was but with rightclicking and copying allowed. Just select the required content and copy.
   

2. Copy using ‘Print Friendly and PDF’ Extension

   Extensions impart additional features to web browsers. Print Friendly and PDF extension provides better printing/ convertion to PDF facilities by removing unnecessary elements required in print like menu, header, advertisements, images and other items. The extension will provide you with a preview window before printing or before converting to PDF where you can copy the content from a copy protected/ right click enabled website.
   First install the Print Friendly and PDF extension for Chrome from here and firefox from here.
   
   Follow the steps of installation.
   
   
   
   After the installation, the icon of the extension will be shown on the right side of the menu bar.
   
   

   

   Open the desired webpage in browser. Click on the Print friendly and PDF extension’s icon. A popup window opens with the content so as to edit the non-removed items. Just click and select the content with your mouse and without releasing the mouse button, press CTRL +C to copy the selected text. Clicking on a text paragraph will remove that paragraph from the webpage. Hence do not release the mouse button from clicked state, before copying. Use CTRL+P to paste the copied content.

   

3. Copy using ‘Capture2Text’ application

   
   Capture2text is a Windows application that captures the text shown on the screen and converts to text format through Optical character recognition (OCR). The copied text will be copied to clipboard automatically. Get Capture2text from the Sourceforge website and install it.
   After installation, launch the application by doubleclicking on the app icon. Then, icon of the app will be displayed as a Windows notification tray icon. You can right click on the t icon to change some of its features. Apart from that, there is no user interface for the application.
   
   
   
   Please see the image above on how to capture a text from your screen for converting to text. Position your text on the left top of the text to be captured. Press Windows+Q keys together to initiate text capture. Now just drag your mouse down and to the right to cover the area of the text. Click to stop the selection. If you forgot to place the mouse on the top left of the text before capturing, right click and drag to the beginning of the text and then release the right mouse button.
   
   
   Your captured text will be copied automatically to clipboard. To preview the text you can enable displaying the popup box. Capture2text allows OCR of nearly 100 languages including English, Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil, to name a few and the entire list is available in the website.
   To capture a single line of text, you can use the shortcut Windows +E. You can read about more tips from the above page.
   

4. Copy from source code of the webpage

   The procedure is this. Just press CTRL+S together and save the webpage as text format or as html only format.
   Find the most distinctive word from the text to be copied. Open the html file saved now in your computer using notepad and search for the term. Simply select the text that you want to copy and copy the text easily. Just delete any webpage specific text, if any, manually.
   
   

   

Though there are several other methods like disabling javascript, saving the webpage as pdf and then copying from it, saving the file as mht files and then copy by opening it in Word, etc. but these techniques do not work in all the cases.

Thank you for reading.