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.