Extracting Blocks of Text from PDF

Before you can copy sections of text in a PDF document to the Clipboard or another open document, you need to select the text in the PDF document. To select text in a PDF document, you use two of the three different tools found on the Selection toolbar, which is attached to the Basic toolbar:

• Select Text tool (V): Use this tool to select lines or columns of text by dragging through them.
• Select Table tool (Shift+V): Use this tool to select a table or block of text with its formatting by drawing a bounding box around the table or text block.

You can also use the TouchUp Text tool (press T to select this tool) to select a block of text defined by its underlying document structure tags, such as whole headings or whole paragraphs. True to its name, this tool should be used only when you need to extract small amounts of text from a PDF document. Like the text selection tools on the Basic toolbar, text selected with the TouchUp Text tool can be copied, deleted, edited, and placed in other program documents . When you use the Select Text tool to select lines or columns of text in a PDF document, you can then copy the selected text to the Clipboard by choosing Edit➪Copy or by pressing Ctrl+C (Ô+C on the Mac). After you’ve copied the text to the Clipboard, you can switch to a document open in another program and then paste the copied text into the file by using that program’s Edit➪Paste command or by pressing Ctrl+V (Ô+V on the Mac).