USE CASE
Collect text from several web pages and copy it all at once
Collect useful passages from several web pages in one list, arrange them and tidy the line breaks, then copy them all at once. This guide shows how to use Copy & Prep.
Switching tabs for every passage you copy
Researching one topic leaves you with five or six tabs open. Every time a paragraph looks useful you select it, copy it, switch to a notepad or a document, paste it, and go back to the tab you came from.
After a few rounds of that, what you have is a pile of text in no particular order — and usually no memory of which page each paragraph came from.
Repeated copying and pasting
Moving a single passage costs you all of this:
- Select the text and copy it
- Switch to the tab you are pasting into
- Scroll to the end and paste
- Go back and find where you were reading
Then, at the end, the order has to be rearranged where you pasted it, and the line breaks the web put in have to be taken out one line at a time. If you want the source noted, you open each page again just to fetch the URL.
The same job with Copy & Prep
- 1
Select text on a page and choose "Add to Copy & Prep" from the right-click menu. The toolbar badge shows how many you have.
- 2
Do the same on the next page. Add from as many pages as you like, or from several places on one page, in whatever order.
- 3
Open the settings tab to review the list. Use Move up and Move down to reorder items, and delete anything you do not need.
- 4
Press "Tidy up" and the before and the after appear side by side. Nothing changes until you press apply.
- 5
Press "Copy all" and everything is joined in display order and copied in one go. Choose plain text or Markdown. To check first, use Review all or Review selected, look over text and sources, then press Copy this text.
What you collected survives closing the browser, and copying never clears the list. Deleting is always your action.
What this looks like in practice
Three articles, one summary
Read pieces on the same topic side by side and keep only what each concludes. Reorder them once you are done reading and you have a comparison note.
Material for a report or minutes
Add the passages you want to quote as you read. The material is already assembled when you start writing, so nothing has to be moved into an editor first.
Moving text into an issue or a doc
Choose Markdown if the app you are pasting into supports it. Bullet lists and tables keep their structure.
What Copy & Prep does
- Adds only the passages you pick with the right-click menu, from as many pages as you like
- Lists what you collected and reorders it with Move up and Move down
- Edits an item, and takes an edit back to the originally captured text in one step
- Rejoins wrapped lines inside a paragraph and strips trailing whitespace, with a preview before it applies
- Copies everything at once, as plain text or Markdown
- Includes the page name, URL and date added in the output only when you ask for them — off by default
- Stores everything in chrome.storage.local and makes no network requests
What Copy & Prep does not do
- Read page content on its own. It has no standing content script and requests no host permissions
- Summarize, rephrase or proofread. Tidying touches whitespace and line breaks only
- Carry any AI feature, or send anything to an AI service
- Keep a clipboard history
- Sync to your other devices. chrome.storage.sync is not used
- Produce academic citation formats such as APA or MLA
The tool for this job
Features, permissions and privacy are set out in full on the product page.
Copy & Prep A Chrome extension that collects text from several pages, tidies it up, and copies it all at once See what it does →