How to copy text from a PDF

Select the words with your mouse and press Ctrl+C. In PDF by Zaweba you can drag over the text, double-click to pick up a single word or triple-click to take a whole line, and if you want the copied text to keep its lines and gaps the way they sit on the page, press Ctrl+Shift+C instead. It works on any PDF that holds real text, offline, with no account.

That's the short answer. The rest of this page covers the different ways of selecting, what the two kinds of copy give you, and why a PDF sometimes refuses to hand over its words.

Choosing exactly the words you want

Most of the time you'll just drag from the first word to the last. For smaller jobs the clicks are quicker. A double-click picks one word, which is handy for a reference number or a name you need to paste into an email. A triple-click takes the whole line. If you've started a selection and it stops short, hold Shift and click where you want it to end, and the selection stretches to that point without starting over.

Two more tricks are worth knowing. Ctrl+A selects all the text on the page you're looking at, which is the fastest way to grab a full page of a report. And Alt+drag selects a column. That matters on pages laid out in two or three columns, where an ordinary drag runs straight across the gap and mixes the end of one column's line with the start of the next. With Alt held down you draw a box round just the column you want, and only that text is chosen.

Plain copy or copy with layout

Ctrl+C gives you the text as running words, ready to drop into an email, a document or a search box. That's usually what you want.

Ctrl+Shift+C is different. It copies one line per line, and turns the gaps between words on the page into spaces, so the copied text looks roughly like the page did. Use it for things where the position of words carries meaning: an address block, a set of figures lined up in columns, a code listing, or a form where labels and values sit side by side. Paste it into a plain text editor and the lines stay where they were.

If what you've selected is really a table, there's a better option again. PDF by Zaweba can copy a table so it pastes into a spreadsheet as rows and columns, which has its own guide.

When the text won't copy

There are two common reasons a PDF won't let you copy from it, and they look quite different.

The first is that the document's owner switched copying off when they made it. A PDF can carry permissions, and copying text is one of them. When that's the case, PDF by Zaweba doesn't quietly fail. It refuses the copy and tells you why, so you're not left wondering whether you pressed the wrong keys. If you need the text, the person who sent the file is the one to ask.

The second is that the page has no text in it at all. A scanned letter or a photographed page is a picture of words, not words, so there's nothing for a text selection to catch. You'll notice because dragging doesn't highlight anything. For a scan you can still copy part of the page as a picture with Edit > Take a snapshot, which is often enough for sharing a paragraph or a signature block.

Getting a clean paste

Text from a PDF sometimes needs a moment of tidying once it lands, because the PDF stores lines, not paragraphs. A few habits help. Copy one section at a time rather than whole pages when you're pasting into a document with its own formatting. Use the column selection on multi-column pages before you blame the paste. And if you're after a lot of text, a whole report, say, it's quicker to export every word to a text file than to copy page by page.

Copying is also a gentle way to work with a document you don't want to change. Nothing you select or copy alters the PDF, so you can lift quotes from a contract or figures from a statement without any risk of saving an accidental edit.

PDF by Zaweba is free software for Windows and works entirely on your own computer. Open the file, select, copy, and get on with whatever you needed the words for.