Copying and pasting text, tables, images, and graphics

You can use Adobe Reader to select text, a table, an image, or a graphic in an Adobe PDF document, copy it to the clipboard, or paste it into a document in another application.
Note: This is an directly from the Adobe Reader 6 help file. More information on this product can be found there.

Related Subtopics:

Copying and pasting small amounts of text

Copying and pasting tables

Copying images

Copying and pasting a combination of text and graphics as an image

Copying and pasting small amounts of text

The Select Text tool enables you to select text or columns of text in an Adobe PDF document. You can use the Copy and Paste commands to copy the selected text into another application.

You can specify in the General preferences that whenever the Hand tool hovers over text in an Adobe PDF document, it automatically functions as the Select Text tool.

Select text by dragging from an insertion point to an end point or by dragging diagonally over text.

If the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands are dim when you select text, the creator of the PDF document may have set restrictions against copying text.

Note: If a font copied from a PDF document is not available on the system displaying the copied text, the font cannot be preserved. A default font is substituted.

To select characters, spaces, words or lines of text:

Select the Select Text tool , and do one of the following:

Click to create an insertion point at the beginning of the text to be selected, and then drag to the end of the text. (You can also click to create an insertion point, and shift-click to create a second insertion point. The text between the two insertion points is selected.)
Double-click to select a word.
Triple-click to select a line of text.
Click four times to select all the text in a page.
To extend a selection letter by letter, press Shift and move the arrow key in the direction you want to extend the selection. To extend a selection word by word, press Shift+Ctrl (Windows) or Shift+Command (Mac OS) and move the arrow key in the direction you want to extend the selection.

You can revert to the Hand tool at any time by pressing Esc. You can switch to the Hand tool temporarily by holding down the space bar.

Note: If the PDF document was created using a scanner, or if the text is part of an image, the text may be recognized as an image, not as characters that you can select.

To select a column of text:

Select the Select Text tool , and move the cursor towards the column of text. When the cursor changes to a vertical bar with a box superimposed , the Select Text tool is in column select mode. To force column selection rather than text selection, press Alt.
Do one of the following:

Click outside the text area, and drag a marquee over the block or column of text.
To select text in more than one column, drag from the beginning of the text in one column to the end of text you want to select.

The sensitivity with which the Select Text tool changes from text selection mode to column selection mode is set in the General preferences.

To select all the text on a page:

Choose Single Page mode for the page layout, select the Select Text tool , and do one of the following:

Select any amount of text on the page, then press Ctrl-A (Windows) or Command-A (Mac OS) to extend the selection to all the text on the page.
Choose Edit > Select All.

Ctrl-click, and choose Select All.Note: If Continuous or Continuous-Facing is selected for the page layout, all the text in the document is selected.

Click four times in the page. This method selects all the text on the page regardless of the page layout.

To copy selected text:

Use the Select Text tool

to select any amount of text on the page.

Do one of the following:

Choose Edit > Copy to copy the selected text to another application.
Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS), and choose Copy to Clipboard.
Press Ctrl-C (Windows) or Command-C (Mac OS) to copy the selected text.

Copying and pasting tables

You can extract a table with its formatting intact, and then copy or import the table into another application. You can use the Snapshot tool to copy an image of a table to the clipboard or into an open document in another application.

To copy a table as an image using the Snapshot tool:

Select the Snapshot tool .
Drag a box around the rows and columns to be copied. Click OK. Your selection is copied automatically to the clipboard.
To copy the selection into an open document in another application, choose Edit > Copy in Adobe Reader, and then choose Edit > Paste in an open document in the other application.

Note: The table is copied as a bitmap; it is no longer editable.

Copying images

You can copy and paste individual images from an Adobe PDF document to the clipboard, to another application, or to a file using the Select Image tool.

To copy an image using the Select Image tool:

Select the Select Image tool , and do one of the following:

To select a single image, click in the image you want to copy, or drag a marquee around the image.
To select a portion of an image, drag a marquee around the desired area.
To deselect an image and start over, click anywhere outside the selected image.

To copy the selected image, do one of the following:

To copy the image to the clipboard, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) and choose Copy Image to Clipboard.
Drag the selected image into an open document in another application.

Copying and pasting a combination of text and graphics as an image

You can use the Snapshot tool to copy the contents of the selection marquee (either text, a graphic, or a mix of the two) to the clipboard or to another application. Both text and graphics are copied as an image.

To copy a graphic or text in image format using the Snapshot tool:

Select the Snapshot tool , and do one of the following:

Click anywhere in the page to capture the entire content displayed on the screen.
Drag a marquee around the text, or images, or a combination of both.
Drag a marquee within an image to copy just a portion of the image.

Colors in the selected area are inverted momentarily to highlight the selection. The selection is copied automatically to the clipboard when you release the mouse button. If you have a document open in another application, you can use the Edit > Paste command to paste the copied selection directly into the target document.