Tool to copy web text plus URL--in one go?

September 11, 2012 1:04 PM

There must be a tool for this: I want to copy text from a web page, then paste into in a word processing document, with the URL of the original page somehow appended to the text--say, in parenthesis at the end. Any suggestions?
posted by largecorp to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

OneNote does this automatically. You could copy it into OneNote and then from there into Word.
posted by Jairus at 1:11 PM on September 11, 2012

This would be relatively trivial to cook up with an Applescript or Automator action in OS X. What operating system are you using?
posted by bcwinters at 1:22 PM on September 11, 2012

Evernote kinda does / can do this with its applet for Firefox
posted by Heart_on_Sleeve at 1:49 PM on September 11, 2012

Best answer: Sounds like something a bookmarklet would do, heres one called TextSelect thats pretty close, it puts the URL at the start but I'm sure you could modify it.
posted by Lanark at 1:54 PM on September 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

I was going to say OneNote as well.
posted by neilbert at 5:55 PM on September 11, 2012

Make Link for Firefox (by MeFi's Own™ roryparle) does this. It is great.
posted by scruss at 6:03 PM on September 11, 2012

You might also look at Clearly (the applet that Heart_on_Sleeve mentioned), or Readability. Both of these are browser add-ons that are designed to strip off all of the extraneous formatting/sidebars and save the web page content for later. Clearly is paired up with Evernote (and will include the URL); Readability has a larger number of targets, including email.
posted by kovacs at 6:51 PM on September 11, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks for the leads. I'm on Mac (shoulda said) so OneNote is out, but looks like I should mess around with the browser add-ons.

Evernote actually does this well (IMO), which is what inspired the question. Evernote puts the URL in its own field, though, so I don't end up with a pretty little bundle of text+URL.

Thanks!
posted by largecorp at 7:47 PM on September 11, 2012

Response by poster: TextSelect does just what I need--thanks Lanark!
posted by largecorp at 7:59 PM on September 11, 2012

There's actually a CSS trick you can use to do this; just add the following to the page's stylesheet (e.g. by using the web developer features):

a:after { content: "[" attr(href) "]" }

This will insert [http://blahblahblah/] behind every link.
posted by destrius at 12:22 AM on September 12, 2012