Pasting content into other program
There is a wide variety of tools and methods for moving contents, including text and graphic components, into and out of PDF documents. Following are some of the more useful tools and techniques.
Pasting Selected Text
It’s easy to copy and paste selected portions of the text in a PDF document. Here’s how:
Expand the Basic toolbar to show all three selection tools (Hand Tool, Select Tool, and Snapshot Tool).
Click the Select tool.
Click and drag over the text you want to select.
Copy this selected text by doing one of the following:
Choose Edit > Copy.
Press Ctrl+Insert.
Right-click the selected text to activate the context menu and choose Copy To Clipboard.
Move to the application and document into which you would like to insert your selected and copied text, and paste it.
Pasting an Image
To copy and paste a single image:
Expand the Basic toolbar to show all three selection tools (Hand Tool, Select Tool, and Snapshot Tool).
Click the Select tool.
Click the image you want to select. A negative view of the image will appear, indicating that it is selected.
Copy this selected image by doing one of the following:
Choose Edit > Copy.
Press Ctrl+Insert.
Right-click the selected image to activate the context menu and choose Save Image As. Select a location and a file format for your image in the Save Image As window.
Exporting or Pasting a Table
You can export a table, open it in another application, or copy and paste it:
Expand the Basic toolbar to show all three selection tools (Hand Tool, Select Tool, and Snapshot Tool).
Click the Select tool.
Click and drag over the table you want to select. A negative view of the table cells will appear, indicating that table is selected.
Copy this selected table by doing one of the following:
Choose Edit > Copy.
Press Ctrl+Insert.
Right-click the selected table to activate the context menu and choose one of the copy or export options: Copy As Table, Save As Table, or Open Table In Spreadsheet.
An icon for the preferred spreadsheet application (Excel, if this application had been installed on the computer) will appear next to the Open Table In Spreadsheet menu item.
If you chose Save As Table, select a location and a file format for your table in the Acrobat Save As dialog. If you chose Copy As Table, move to the application and document into which you would like to insert your selected and copied table, and paste it as usually. The table format is not always preserved; therefore it is often necessary to copy the table from PDF as text, with the subsequent manual reconstruction of the table structure in other application.
Using Snapshots to copy images from PDF
If you ever need to copy just a portion of a PDF document page, Acrobat provides a screen capture tool just for this purpose, and it’s easy to use. Here’s how:
Zoom in on the portion of the PDF document page you would like to capture.
Select the Snapshot tool (just to the right of the selection tools).
Make a snapshot selection in either of two ways:
Click just once on the active PDF document window, and the entire visible area of the PDF document panel will be captured. (This is why you should zoom in to just the area you wanted to capture.)
Click and drag across the area you would like to capture, and a thin, dashed selection rectangle will be drawn around your snapshot area.
In both cases, a message will appear informing you that the selected area has been copied to the Clipboard. (You can disable this message by clicking the Do Not Show This Message Again check box.)
You can now paste this Snapshot image from the Clipboard into any application— such as Photoshop or a page layout program’s graphic box—that will accept a graphic image. Also, you can resize the pasted image by dragging the black square control points on the edges of the pasted image.
If you paste this screen capture into a page layout document, it will embed rather than link this image. So if you need to use only linked images, copy this screen grab into Photoshop first, save the image out of Photoshop, and then place that image as a linked image into your page layout document. When copying a PDF snapshot into Photoshop, simply select File > New (the new image will have the same dimensions as the snapshot) and then paste the snapshot into the new image (which will paste the snapshot into a new layer). Finish up by flattening the image.
