Over at Emacs Dwelling, James Dyer has a nice post on capturing only the visible portion of a folded Org region. When you call kill-ring-save (Meta+w) on a folded region, it will capture everything to the kill ring—even the hidden text. As Dyer says, the folding is just a display hack. All the text is still there.
But sometimes Dyer wants to copy just the visible part. When I first read that, I couldn’t think of how to proceed without a lot of research and probably bit twiddling. That was just me overthinking the problem. It turns out to be pretty easy. The secret is org-copy-visible, which despite its name works outside of Org as well1.
Once you know that, the rest is easy. You need only call org-copy-visible instead of kill-ring-save. Dyer does that using the shortcut Ctrl+u Meta+w when he wants to copy only the visible part.
Take a look at his post for the code if this sort of thing interests you. You can, of course, simply call org-copy-visible explicitly but if you do it a lot, a shortcut such as Dyer’s make sense.
Footnotes:
I haven’t verified this but Dyer says he’s used it with Dired