What are you trying to copy from? Make sure you click just brely away from the text and it should work, or copy all of it and delete it when you paste it.

If you use Ctrl + c, you can copy almost any character, segment, or line by itself, without including any of the other stuff between the segments.

Hold down the “Ctrl” and “c” keys, and then copy whatever parts of the page you want to, regardless of their locations on the page.

E.g.:

You can copy/pasttry to copy/pasttrying to copy from?

Those ▲ are segments that I copied from this page.
I just thought of the Ctrl + c idea, and apparently you have to manually make whatever separations you want in the text field.

Here’s the adjusted layout:

You can copy/past
try to copy/past
trying to copy from?

It’s not currently possible in most programs.
Maybe some day a bright spark will program a “selection box” or suchlike to select arbitrary areas of text, and add it to GTK or whatever toolkit. Until then we’re stuck with selecting text line by line, unless you want to program an interated regular expression over it or something.

@XOIIO thank you.

@Brian1946 thank you. By the way, what tried to copy/paste is the contact info. On the right side of the screen there is the picture of the people, which I’m made sure I didn’t highlight. But it pastes the heading above the picture and some other text below the picture anyway. But that is not just one website it has always happened, any site, many of them over a long time.

@koanhead thank you.

Are you trying to get something like this?

You can copy/paste the top part
when you try to copy/paste the left p
part as well?

Most programs model a paragraph as one character after another (including spaces, periods, etc…). Its only when they display the text that you have multiple lines within a paragraph. So it doesn’t really make sense to copy the left side.

If you are feeling brave you can right click and View Page Source. In there is the raw HTML. Find the text you want and then you can copy it just as text without the rest getting in the way. Use Crtl-F and type in a few words of it to jump to the right bit. You may have to then remove some HTML coding but this can be a useful technique

A reponse to a lot of what people have said, he means like this for example

Tom bill larry and GAY STORY SO
jill went to the park. I’M GOING TO
This is a seriously SHUT UP NOW.

He wants the capital side only. Try to copy paste it with only the capital side without editing it at all. It’s not possible, I dont belive.

@Brian1946 I did try the CTRL+c it didn’t work for me.
@roundsquare @Stinley @Talkingcamara Thanks.
What you said @Talkingcamara is exactly what I’m referring to.

@flo

“I did try the CTRL+c it didn’t work for me.”

It works for me when I use Firefox and with my word documents.

Did you have both the “Ctrl” and the “c” keys held down before and while you tried to highlight what you wanted to copy?

@Brian1946 I can only use IE on this computer. Yes I did hold down Ctrl and c. In fact it made it highlight what I didn’t want.

Let’s say here
If you just want to highlight the left bottom part (email addresses) you could?

@flo

It doesn’t work for me either when I use IE.

“If you just want to highlight the left bottom part (email addresses) you could?”

Yep:

Terry Mattson
tmattson@visitduluth.com
Anna Tanski
anna@visitduluth.com
Gene Shaw
gshaw@visitduluth.com
Mary Nelson
mnelson@visitduluth.com
Gail Walkowiak
gailw@visitduluth.com
Jill Crow
jcrow@visitduluth.com
Julie Johnson
jjohnson@visitduluth.com
Anne Bubacz Hamann
anneb@visitduluth.com
Kim Holland
kimh@visitduluth.com
Sue Mageau
admgr@visitduluth.com
Lori Steinbach
cvb@visitduluth.com
Nancy Von Riedel
info@visitduluth.com

@Brian1946 I meant to ask you why do you need to involve Word? And which step is that? All I try to do is copy/paste.

@flo

There’s no need to involve Word: I was just wondering if “Ctrl + c” would also work with a word document, and not just a web page that I accessed using Firefox.

However, you could use Word to clipboard (Ctrl + c) what you wanted to copy from what you pasted on the document.

@Brian1946 Okay, anyway, interesting.

By the way how many kinds of highlighting are there? There is the navy blue, but it is not always navy blue right? What is that about?

@flo

I think most highlighting will be navy blue on white pages, but IIRC, I’ve seen white highlighting on dark-colored pages.

I think this is because the idea is to make the highlighting contrast with the page, so that it’ll be easy to see.

@Brian1946 We changed the subject so I’m using whisper by the way. Anyway, I try to make it happen again and it doesn’t happen, although I feel I’m making the same movement as highlight

I have a hack for this. If I went to the page that @flo mentions and wanted to take the names plus the emails but not the job titles I would use Word. The text in the HTML is a table so I would use Word to convert it back to a table and work on it from there:

- Copy the whole lot (names, emails and titles) and paste into Word.

- Click on the little clipboard icon (Paste Options) that appears on the page after you paste and choose the option Text Only. The text changes to: the names, a new paragraph, then the emails, then a tab, then the job title. (You can see these by turning on the Show/Hide option which reveals the formatting marks such as paragraph, space, tab, etc)

- Select all the text then Convert Text to Table and Separate Text at Tabs – the table will have one column with names and emails and the second column with the job titles.

- Delete the job title column and you will have just the names and emails in a table.

- You can convert this back to text if needed.

If this isn’t quite what you were after then tell me what it is and I’ll try to help. I use a lot of Find and Replace when I’m doing stuff like this. You could use Notepad but there would be a lot more Finding and Replacing as Notepad doesn’t do tables

@Stinley thank you. It looks like it might have been fun for you. I was thinking when I posted this: http://www.fluther.com/122525/what-is-the-problem-with-computers/
Why can’t computers be made to be friendlier to people without computer-keen brain?

I just went to Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/index.html

Resources & Programs
American Folklife Center
Keeping culture, art & song alive
Center for the Book
Promoting books, reading & literacy
Copyright Royalty Board
Determining statutory royalty rates & distributing royalties
Digital Preservation
A national partnership to preserve new media
Kluge Center
Enriching the bond between scholars & leaders
Law Library
U.S. & foreign legal collection materials
Poetry
Home of America’s Poet Laureate
Preservation & Conservation
Caring for collections
Teaching with Primary Sources
Resources for instructors
World Digital Library (external link)
Global partnership of cultural treasures

and I copy/pasted only what I wanted. I wish all websites should be designed with whatever it is they used. I suppose they can afford more $

@flo I’m going over to your other thread as it sounds interesting! But for your question here I guess the answer is that it can be done, but not easily. There’s no quick fix at the moment. Solving the cause can take two forms – write websites that don’t create this problem (Library of Congress site) or create a tool that deals with the problem.

@Stinley I guess so.
What do you think of games?Do you think there are just enough or too many or too few?

I don’t really play computer games that much but I like having lots of options when I do feel like a game so probably would say there’s no such thing as too much! I like logical games like sudoku and slitherlink and Blokx (sp?) though I have done these and need new challenges. I do not care for shoot-em ups. My kids have a Wii and we play mostly Wii Party but not a lot. I like board games – Scrabble, Yahtzee, Trivial Pursuits – and card games

@flo When I hold Ctrl and c together, my mouse cursor won’t move.

@roundsquare what are you trying to do and what programme are you using (Firefox, IE, Word, Open Office?) and on what system (PC, Mac, Linux?). Details please!

@Stinley I’m just trying to follow @flo‘s directions.

Its not application dependent. I just tried it in a few apps. Maybe its a WIndows 7 thing. Or maybe it has something to do with Gateway’s mouse drivers. Not sure.

@roundsquare I see. I took a look at the instructions given above (should probably have done that before, oops sorry) and I see what you are trying to do. Can you try just holding down the Ctrl key on its own? then use mouse to highlight the sections. It should work with W7 so there does seem to be a problem.

@flo I was wrong before – holding down the CTRL key while clicking and highlighting the text you want then copying it, is the way to solve your problem to some degree. Do you have the same problem as @roundsquare in that the mouse freezes or is it something else?

@Stinley When I hold control, the mouse moves fine. But, I can’t select multiple blocks of text.

Tricky to solve without seeing what’s happening. It is a feature you should have. Maybe something to do with the mouse – is it a touchpad on a laptop? It’s hard with them to ensure that you keep holding down the Ctrl key and holding down the left mouse button while moving the mouse to the end of the text you want.

You also have to use the mouse, not the arrow keys which is what I would prefer.

@Stinley re. the games, I guess so, it is whatever the market wants…

@roundsquare it is @Brian1946 and @Stinley who gave instructions, not me.

When I hold down Ctrl or Ctrl +c, either, the whole paragraph, etc. gets highlighted, what I want is to only highlight the left or right side of the page, when they are not divided by div’s No freezing happened so far.

If you are using Ctrl, you click and hold and highlight the line you want then you release the click. Then you click and hold on the next line you want, highlight then release, then so on until you have highlighted the lines you want. Then you can press crtl-C athen paste it . Is that what you were doing?

@Stinley If I want to highlight the 1st and the 3rd line of your last post, for eg. the second I hold down Ctrl and click on the first word, “If”, the whole paragraph gets highlighted. It is only if I ignore that, and move the mouse toward the end of the line, that the highlight on the rest of the paragraph disappears, which is good. the first line. Now, when I try to highlight the 3rd line, the 2nd line is also highlighted.

I’ve had a look at it in Internet Explorer and I experienced the same issue as you. So the problem lies with IE.

Firefox is different and works as I described.

You could get Firefox (it’s free) or copy and paste into a word processing programme like Word (but not Notepad, doesn’t work there) then highlight each line as described

@Stinley Thanks. It is too much work to copy and paste one item at a time.