Selecting tables and formatted text

The second text tool on the Basic toolbar is called the Select Table tool, and as its name implies, you use this tool when you want to copy text set in a table or to copy text along with its formatting (including font, font size, text color, alignment, line spacing, and indents when saving in an RTF — Rich Text Format — file format). To use the Select Table tool, you use its cross-hair mouse pointer to draw a bounding box around a table or lines of text that you want to select. As soon as you release the mouse button, Acrobat encloses the selected text or table in a heavy blue outline. The Select Table tool can make table selections based on a PDF document’s underlying document structure tags. To find out if you’re working with a tagged PDF document, right-click the page with the Select Table tool to see if the Select Table Uses Document Tags command is activated (the PDF file is tagged) or grayed-out (the PDF file in untagged) on the context menu. Acrobat automatically selects this command when you open a tagged PDF document. If you’re working with a tagged PDF document, you can simply click with the Select Table tool to select a table or lines of text formatted as a table.
When Acrobat identifies a text selection as a table, it maintains the structure of the table by preserving the layout of the data in rows and columns of cells. If you then save the table data in the RTF file format for use in a word-processed document, the table maintains this layout in the new document. If you save the table data in the CSV (Comma Separated Values) text file format, which is the default format selected by Acrobat, the program maintains the table structure by separating the data items with commas and hard returns. This creates what is often called a comma delimited text file that most database and spreadsheet programs can convert easily into their own native file formats.

Selecting columns of text

The Select Text tool enables you to select complete columns of text without having to worry about selecting text in any adjacent columns on the page that you don’t want to include. Use this tool when you need to copy all or part of columns on a single page of a PDF document that uses newspaper columns.
To select a column of text with the Select Text tool, you simply drag the Ibeam pointer from the top-left corner of a column of text in a diagonal direction toward the bottom-right corner of the column of text and release the mouse button.
In this figure, I have used the Select Text tool to select all the text in the righthand column. The selected text is now available for copying to the Clipboard or dragging to a document in another program window. If you’re working with a lot of text in a PDF document, you can configure the Hand tool in Acrobat 6 to automatically function as the Select Text tool when you hover it over text in a PDF document. Choose Edit➪Preferences or press Ctrl+K (Ô+K on Mac) to open the Preferences dialog box. Click General in the list box on the left to display the General Preferences options, and then select the Enable Text Selection for the Hand tool check box. You can enter values (measured in picas) in the Text Selection Margin Size and Column Selection Margin Size text boxes to specify how much white space around text or columns to allow before the Hand tool transforms into the Text Selection tool and vice versa.

Using drag-and-drop to copy text

Instead of copying and pasting to and from the Clipboard, you can just drag the selected text from the PDF file open in an Acrobat window to a new document open in another program window. Figure how this method works.
PDF document open in the Acrobat program window on the right, I dragged the Select Text tool through the lines with the title and the first paragraph of text to select it. Then I dragged this text selection to the new document window open in Microsoft Word on the left by positioning the arrowhead mouse pointer (with the outline of the text selection) at the very beginning of the blank document.