Although some people use the internet for so many other purposes, the primary role of the internet is to share information and the easiest way to have your information shared is by putting it on a website.
Some website developers, in an effort to ‘protect’ their information on their website have come up with ways of making text selection, image downloads and right-clicking impossible on their site that makes you wonder why they even put it on their site if they don’t want it to be shared.
Sometimes you don’t want to share the entire page link, but select a paragraph or a few lines in the text and share that with someone else, but you may encounter “action disabled” notifications on those websites that have the function disabled.
In this COVID-19 era where access to information is almost as important as breathing, we have brought you (not copied) ways through which you can copy text and images from those websites that have the function disabled.
Disable JavaScript from the browser
JavaScript is a scripting language used by web developers to bring or deny a lot of functionalities to a website, and disabling copying is one of them. If you want to copy text, all you have to do is go to your browser’s settings, search for JavaScript, and disable it. Refresh the page you want to copy and all should work just fine.
If you are done copying, go back and enable it because some websites actually don’t run on browsers with disabled JavaScript functionality.
Print the web page to PDF
This is as easy as breathing. On your desktop, all you have to do is go to the web page you intend to copy content from and press CTRL + P, then then save. On your smartphone, tap Menu, select share, then tap on the print option, the save the document.
Look for the saved PDF document in your files and copy all the text you want.
Take a screenshot
If you want to save an image from a website but the website has the “save image as…” option disabled, just take a screenshot of the page. For those on the desktop version, simply press FN + PRTSC, then paste it in ‘Paint’.
You can them crop out the unwanted parts in your photo editor. If it is text, you can then use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to copy text from the image.
Copy from website source code
A website’s source code is like the skeleton of the website. Every content as you see it on the web page is enclosed in a string of tags that you can see, and copy if you right click on the page and select “view page source.” If right-clicking is disabled, just press CTRL + U. For those on the phone, go to the URL of the page you want to see the source code, edit it by typing “view-source:” at the beginning the press go.
This will take you to a page that might confuse you if you do not have a little programming background but you can search for the content you want to copy and do as you please.
Select from inspect element.
This almost works the same as the view page source option, only that this is better if you are copying smaller text content. Right click the on the web page and select “Inspect element”, it is usually the last option from the provided menu. If right-clicking is disabled, just press CTRL + SHIFT + I.
You will be taken to a window where you can locate the text you want to copy, and help yourself.
PS:
It should be noted that we are not promoting the lazy culture of copy and paste, because we respect people’s content, all we are providing are options of having this content shared, and reminding you to please give appropriate credit to the source where you copied the content from; like we are shouting out to our friends at Manje Media for a few tips for this article.