I attended Ekanath’s presentation at the Festival of Inspiration on using the VedaBase and got a good hint. It helped solve one of those pesky little inconveniences.

When I would try to copy a quote larger than the window size it was always a hassle. Because the VedaBase has so much information in it, if I tried to expand the selected area for copying beyond the viewable area by dragging the mouse down, it would just go crazy fast and I would end up way down the page. It is uncontrollable.

Clicking at the start of the quote, then going to the end and using Shift/Click, usually a reliable method in Windows programs, just didn’t work. I would have to copy the first part of the quote, then scroll down and copy the next part in an additional Copy and Paste operation or even do it several times if the quote was really large.

Ekanath gave the obeisances worthy hint — click at the beginning of the quote and then use Shift/Arrow keys to move around the page to increase or decrease the size of the selected area.

Shift/Arrow keys ki jaya!

Playing with it, I found that while the Shift/Arrow keys enable moving around the page one letter or whole line at a time, Shift/Page Down does exactly what you think it would do — increases the selected area by a whole screenful at a time. This would be great for even larger quotes.

Using Shift/Page Down to cover large areas and then fine tune it with the Shift/Arrow keys would be the way to do larger quotes.

Another hint he gave that I already use but when he polled the room surprisingly few were aware of is worth mentioning. That is using the Copy With Reference and Copy With Reference — Without Diacritics buttons. They are located on the toolbar at the top of the page about 3/4s of the way to the right past all the Navigation and Search buttons. If you squint they look like little clipboards or copies of pages.

Once you have selected the area you want to copy, if you use these buttons instead of Edit/Copy or Ctrl+C, when you go to Paste it automatically gives you the citation for the quote.

Examples:

Using regular Copy and Paste:

Thus we find that in Bhagavad-gétä Lord Kåñëa advises go-rakñya, the protection of cows.

Using Copy With Reference:

Thus we find that in Bhagavad-gétä Lord Kåñëa advises go-rakñya, the protection of cows.

>>> Ref. VedaBase => SB 9.15.25

Using Copy With Reference — Without Diacritics:

Thus we find that in Bhagavad-gita Lord Krsna advises go-raksya, the protection of cows.

>>> Ref. VedaBase => SB 9.15.25

While Krsna has hundreds and millions of names, most lay persons won’t recognize Kanea as one of them so I use Copy With Reference — Without Diacritics most frequently, because I can’t remember the name of the font in Word programs that make the diacritics look right.

The only fly in the ointment here is the “>>> Ref. VedaBase => ” that I feel compelled to remove and is a little chore but that is written into the code of the program and no way to opt out of it.

Anyway, select the quotable area, Copy With Reference — Without Diacritics, Paste, delete the branding, add quotation marks and viola:

“Thus we find that in Bhagavad-gita Lord Krsna advises go-raksya, the protection of cows.”

SB 9.15.25