Selecting just the text I want

[chrisqqgx4]

These are just examples, but I'm having problems selecting just the text I want in a web page. I'm after just the article text itself. Examples:

In this BBC page I can drag and select the text I want easy enough:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/science/nature/4582872.stm

But with this long page I have to drag and scroll down for quite some time to select the text I want (again, the article only, not the other text that appears on the page):

http://www.juancole.com/2006/01/abramoff-and-al-arian-lobbyists.html

And on this page I can't select what I want at all:

http://www.slyck.com/ng.php

As I click on 1. Intro and then drag down, it includes the other text from the right hand side of the page that isn't part of the article itself.

The others I can live with, but that last one is a pain.

Any suggestions?

 

[Zep]

Get them to redesign their web page??

 

[PixyMisa]

Yep.

The formatting on that last site is table-based, and the first two paragraphs of text are completely separate from the following paragraphs, even though it doesn't look that way

Just grab it in two, three, however many blocks you need to avoid getting other stuff along with the text.

 

[kevin]

you can do a view source on the web page and see if it's easier to select from there. It should at least make the table breaks causing the problems clearer.

 

[alfaniner]

Select (double-click) the first word, go down to the last word, hold Shift, and click. This is good for selecting long articles. It still doesn't do anything about the table format.

 

[moopet]

Get them to redesign their web page??

Seconded - seriously. Email them and register your complaint. People should be writing web sites better than this by now, it's no longer the dark age of 1993.