auto-permalink icons in copy-paste

[Charilaos Skiadas]

This is probably fairly minor, but I am a bit bothered with how auto-permalinks behave when copying. In the figure below, whose text you can find here: https://skiadas.github.io/robotics-course-site/sec-exam1-study-guide.html

Each list item has an auto-permalink entry associated with it, available when hovered over to the left, which can be clicked on to get a link to that particular location, and that’s all fine and well.

But when I try to select a particular line for copying like I did in the picture above, or maybe try to copy multiple lines, it is extremely easy to also include in the copy the permalink character 🔗   (and completely unavoidable for multiple lines with permalinks in-between them.

In my opinion those hyperlink characters should not be copyable, and I believe we can achieve that by adding to the .autopermalink css:

.autopermalink {

user-select: none;

}

This allows the autopermalinks to still be clicked but they are no longer selectable for copy-paste. Am I missing something?

Would that affect the behavior for screen readers in some way?

On a tangential note, I am a bit bothered that I cannot copy the numbers from the numbered list along with the items. But that’s a whole other topic probably, and perhaps hard to do with more custom markers etc.

Charilaos Skiadas
Department of Mathematics
Hanover College

[Rob Beezer]

I believe we have had this problem before, and the solution was similar to what you suggest. Not in a position to dig too deep right now. We had a .unselectable class. Use the pickaxe (git log -S unselectable) for more history?

On May 3, 2026 7:39:50 PM GMT+02:00, Charilaos Skiadas <cski...@gmail.com> wrote:
>This is probably fairly minor, but I am a bit bothered with how auto-permalinks behave when copying. In the figure below, whose text you can find here: https://skiadas.github.io/robotics-course-site/sec-exam1-study-guide.html
>
>Each list item has an auto-permalink entry associated with it, available when hovered over to the left, which can be clicked on to get a link to that particular location, and that’s all fine and well.
>But when I try to select a particular line for copying like I did in the picture above, or maybe try to copy multiple lines, it is extremely easy to also include in the copy the permalink character 🔗 (and completely unavoidable for multiple lines with permalinks in-between them.
>
>In my opinion those hyperlink characters should not be copyable, and I believe we can achieve that by adding to the .autopermalink css:
>
>.autopermalink {
> user-select: none;
>}
>
>This allows the autopermalinks to still be clicked but they are no longer selectable for copy-paste. Am I missing something?
>Would that affect the behavior for screen readers in some way?
>
>

>

[Andrew Scholer]

Sounds like a great idea. I can't see any accessibility concerns. (If anything, I think we should be doing more to suppress the permalinks for screen readers.)

As for current examples, there is no generic `.unselectable` rule. Applying the style directly to `.autopermalink` as you propose makes sense.

Andrew

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[Charilaos Skiadas]

Ok pull request prepared: https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/pull/2839

I assumed that I should include a run of the cssbuilder script as part of the commit.

I did find a .prompt.unselectable in the codelikes, I think probably added when we did the console changes to include the prompts. An alternative would be to unify those two into a .unselectable and add that class to the generated permalinks, though maybe something to do if more unselectable cases come up? 

Charilaos Skiadas
Department of Mathematics
Hanover College

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