So below you'll find a bug (| feature?) so niche and specific... but applevis is actually the perfect place for this.
So for those who enjoy reading fanfictions on one of the oldest website still in activity, ffn (desktop version), you may have noticed how it's impossible to copy a chapter's text to paste it elsewhere like in a .txt document for personal archive and offline/easy reading of the whole story.
Before 2020 life was easier as we had plenty of downloaders like ficsave.xyz and ff2ebook.com which were working perfectly fine (mostly) to download a full story in one click. But since then ffn had a DDOS attack and now everything is behind cloudflare... so most if not all these downloaders are either horribly unreliable or just completely broken.
Now, this (the impossibility to copy a text in the story content html landmark) is a problem only experienced on mac, and chromeos with both screen readers. The TLDR, for those who don't know, and @developers please feel free to clarify, is that windows web accessibility, at least with jaws and NVDA, doesn't simply let the cursor interact with the browser. It parses and periodically refreshes the page from the DOM. This is the reason why we have such an easy time to select literally any text we want on Windows whether it's a web app or a regular web page.
So on windows, screen readers don't care about this controversial (and IMO completely unnecessary javascript blocking of copy of the selected text) and can directly copy the text the parser has already gotten anyway. On mac, the browser doesn't matter, as although you can just do cmd a cmd c, the story content portion will be completely ignored.
So my advice is, depending on the fandom, get out of ffn as this site is near death and bugs there are piling up and migrate as much as possible elsewhere like ao3 or , or if like me you keep up to date archives of fanfictions, do this on windows.
I am really, really curious to see any comment below my post :) as this is soo specific.
By TheBlindGuy07, 4 May, 2025
Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Comments
Shift-VO-c.
I mean, you'd have to copy chunk by chunk and I realize that would get incredibly annoying. But there's a way to do it, if you really want to.
I wonder what would happen if you went super old school and ran lynx in a terminal, and used VO-enter to select and copy the text?
fanfiction downloaders
There are quite a few downloaders to choose from these days.
I prefer to use FicLab, but there’s also FicHub.
ficlab.com and fichub.net.
FicHub caches their stories, so some later chapters might take a while to appear with that service, while FicLab can be a little slow on FFN because of the whole Cloudflare thing.
Oh and FicLab is a firefox and chrome extention.
I have thought, but haven't…
I have thought, but haven't tried yet. I think Cloudflare requires javascript for the captcha validation? ...
For your first idea, forget. Each paragraph / line is a separate element, and we are talking about a full story here...
@kool_turk
Cloudflare is the real issue, before it would have been perfectly okay. I have given up on these downloaders but might give another try from what you seem to say. Life was so easier before.
Ficlab is awesome.
I just downloaded this story to epub.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2551796/1/The-Archetype-Association
It does a 64 second delay between sets of resources, because fanfiction.net apparently has rate/resource limits. It pops up a modal frame at the bottom of the page where you can do settings and the like. You might want to turn off the table of contents, I get 70-some things that just said "link" before getting to the actual text. I opened it in Books to make sure it worked, and yep, it seems to work like any other epub.
I can't imagine downloading a ton of stories, I rarely check it anymore, but it's cool to have a way to do it, in case I want to save anything. It also does other formats besides epub, but that was the default and I figured I'd just get a nice single file for Books. I assume if it can handle generating a sensible epub it can handle the other formats just fine. This is all in Firefox on Mac BTW.
Interesting
I haven't used FFN for years but I love how you can download fics from AO3 - I have one I've saved as a PDF and use it as braille practice.
But it is a frustrating experience trying to select, copy and paste text from VoiceOver... Your reasoning makes sense, but it is so ridiculous that VoiceOver stuffs something so basic up.
Anyway, highly recommend AO3. :)
The delay is intentional,…
The delay is intentional, mainly due to FanFiction.Net (FFN) and its captcha requirements.
Archive of Our Own (AO3) doesn’t have this issue.
However, many stories still haven’t migrated to AO3, so despite its problems, FFN will likely stick around until it eventually fades away.