How to copy any text on any website or in any app

Sometimes it is faster to copy text from websites or apps than typing. For example, addresses, phone numbers and Asian language texts. Also, copying is less prone to typing errors.

However, some websites make it hard to do so. Some turns off the copy function. Some, instead of using text for the info, shows an image of the info. How do I used to solve these problems? For the former, I would inspect the source code of the website then search for the desired string. For the latter, I would print then use OCR function on my scanner to extract that text info. As you can imagine, sometimes typing the text manually can be faster than these workarounds.

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It is so easy and fast to do that on macOS or iOS today. After you take a screenshot of the text you want on a website, save it to a jpeg file. Then open it in the Preview application. Move the mouse over the desired text and the mouse cursor will turn into an edit cursor. Now you can select and copy the text. On iOS, look for a small icon on the bottom right then tap it to select all text in the image. This method works for any app in macOS and iOS, too. Just take a screenshot first.

In the close future, if not already, once a photo or screenshot is taken, all the text in that image would be automatically extracted and be searchable. This is very useful for me because I only take photos of business cards and do not keep physical ones.