Copy/paste utility that appends title and author to text block on paste

January 15, 2018 2:39 PM

Im looking for a Windows or Android tool that when I copy and paste text from something, the title, author, maybe page number or url where applicable, get automatically appended to the block of text Im pasting. IOS IBooks does this but I haven't been able to find the equivalent elsewhere. Note I don't particularly care about stripping out the formatting, and I don't want to lose embedded urls. It would be very useful when collecting research notes. thanks!
posted by rhc to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

May not help, but the Windows Kindle app does this too.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 2:42 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Evernote captures the source url when you copy and paste (or use the clipper extension). I've never looked to see if it can be set to capture more than that, but it's clearly holding at least one piece of that metadata so why not more? (I suppose it depends on what the source is I guess.) I believe OneNote will do the same, and also timestamps the paste.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:44 PM on January 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Webpages, where this extra information comes from, do not have access to your clipboard so as to modify the "selection = cut/copy" mechanism you're already using to pull text from a page. There are javascript solutions, though, and while I haven't been able to find one in the last minute, it should be fairly straightforward to use Grease/Tampermonkey for this.
posted by rhizome at 2:44 PM on January 15, 2018

In Windows, you can record scripts (a sequence of actions such as copy + paste etc.), called macros, and assign them as a keyboard shortcut. See this how-to.
posted by rada at 2:45 PM on January 15, 2018

For desktop browsers, there's FormatLink (Firefox) and Create Link (Chrome/Chromium). They'll need a bit of configuration to get exactly what you need to copy, but I wouldn't cite without them.
posted by scruss at 3:34 PM on January 15, 2018

Microsoft OneNote notes the source url when you paste from a webpage. It’s a pretty useful note taking tool. It’s part of MS office.
posted by monotreme at 3:54 PM on January 15, 2018

The amount of metadata on the clipboard depends entirely on what the program you're copying from supports. Most browsers will supply a source URL with the HTML that they provide the clipboard, but they don't (directly) provide anything else. (Some programs will pull down the webpage in the background and parse some of the metadata on its own when you paste this HTML, but it's hardly universal.) Most other apps will provide just the text you copied for compatibility and possibly a few richer formats that preserve formatting, but not much in the way of metadata. So, if you need this data you'll need to make sure the program you're copying *from* supports sending it.
posted by Aleyn at 9:48 PM on January 15, 2018

Response by poster: All very useful answers. Thank you all.
posted by rhc at 5:12 AM on January 17, 2018