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.