The Art of Copy Paste : An Introductory Guide for Law Students Vol. 3

This is the third post on our series on how to copy paste stuff. The previous posts covered on how to copy text from web and PDFs. This post explain how you could 'paste' (Ctrl+V) effectively.

Paste Paste Paste (Ctrl+V) ….

a) Multiple Paste Method:- Suppose you are reading a judgment and pasting different extracts of the judgment in a doc file. Now each time you find something useful you have to open and then switch to your word processor be it be Notepad or MS Word or something else. This leads to wastage of time. What if you could copy all the stuff in one go and then paste it. This is where clipboard managers come in play. ClipX, Arsclip, CLCL and Ditto are some of the famous ones. My personal favourite is Arsclip.

With a clipboard manager you could simply select the text you want to copy and press ( Ctrl+C) and then move on. Keep on copying text like this and paste it one go.

ProTip –  If you paste all text from Arsclip it will paste the text in the reverse order i.e. the last text is copied in the beginning and the first chunk of text copied in the end. You could fix this. First press ctrl+shift+z in Word where you intend to paste the text.

A similar drop down menu will pop up like this:

In it click on full mode then press ‘L’ or click on ‘pasting tools’ and then click on paste selected text. Select the desired text and then select ‘Paste in Reverse’.

b) Removing Line breaks in PDF:-  Often you will fact this problem you will copy something which looks normal in a pdf and when pasted in word processor it looks like this

 

Now you start the laborious process of deleting unnecessary line breaks. There is a way to automate this.

In word after pasting the text select it and press Ctrl+H, the replace dialog box will open in it write ‘^p’ (^p stands for a line break) without quotes in the Find What blank and give a space in the replace with dialog  and then press replace all.  After this dialog box will ask of you want to continue replacing in the rest of Document press “No’. Your text will be sorted. 

c) Making ‘Paste Special’ Method as Default Option:- Most of you would be knowing about the paste special method in MS Word and how pasting text in ‘unformatted text’ mode of Word 2007 or ‘merge formatting’ and ‘keep text only’ option of Word 2010 merges formatting.  In File à Options à Advanced  you could change the option ‘pasting from other programs’ to ‘merge formatting’ and now onward you could simply paste the text directly from pdf or web without using paste special. In case you want to retain formatting then you could use ‘paste special’ with ‘keep source formatting’ option.

d) Pasting in Protected Fields – Your college/university website may not allow you to directly paste text in the blank fields. This could be easily be overcome by disabling client side scripts. Install this plugin if you are using Google Chrome, this if you are using Mozilla Firefox, this if you are using Opera and this if you are using Safari. Disable all scripts and reload the page. Now, you are good to go.

e) Textarea backup for browsers - As a lawyer often feel obliged to make the shortest possible comment to a 1000 word essay. Often feel frustrated that your comment does not get posted and you will have to rewrite it again. This script will ensure that such situation never take place again and will backup whatever you type in a textarea even after reloading the webpage.