How to select and copy text from a PDF in PDF by Zaweba

Copying a sentence out of a PDF should be easy, yet it is often where PDF readers frustrate people most. The selection jumps across columns, line breaks land in the middle of sentences, or the copy simply fails without saying why. PDF by Zaweba has a small set of selection tools that make this ordinary job behave, and it tells you plainly when it can't help.

All of this works on real text, the kind a PDF contains when it was made from a word processor or a design program. A scan is a picture of a page, so there is nothing to select until it has been through text recognition.

The ways to select

Drag over the text to select it, as you would in any program. A double-click selects a single word, which is the quickest way to grab a name or a reference number. A triple-click selects a whole line. Shift+click extends the selection to wherever you click, so you can click at the start of a passage, scroll down and Shift+click at the end without having to drag across pages.

Alt+drag selects a column. This is the one to remember for documents set in two or three columns, such as newsletters, papers and brochures. An ordinary drag in those layouts tends to run across the columns line by line and produce nonsense. Alt+drag draws a box and takes only what is inside it.

Ctrl+A selects all the text on the page.

Two kinds of copy

Ctrl+C copies the text in the ordinary way, ready to paste into a letter, an email or a note. Ctrl+Shift+C copies with layout. With that, each line on the page becomes one line in what you paste, and gaps on the page become spaces. It is useful when the arrangement of the text matters: an address block, a short list of figures, a piece of code or a set of instructions where you want each line kept.

Which one to use depends on where the text is going. For prose you will rewrite or quote, plain copy is usually tidier. For anything where the lines mean something, copy with layout saves you rebuilding the shape by hand.

For tables there is a separate copy as table command that keeps rows and columns, covered in its own article.

When copying is refused

Some PDFs are made with copying switched off by their owner. In that case PDF by Zaweba refuses to copy and tells you the reason, instead of copying nothing and leaving you to guess. That is deliberate: the restriction belongs to whoever published the document, and the app respects it. If you need the text, the answer is to ask the sender for a version without the restriction.

Getting clean results

If pasted text comes out with odd spacing, try the other copy. A document that uses lots of small separate text runs can paste better with layout, while flowing paragraphs usually paste best with plain copy.

If a selection won't start where you click, you are probably on a picture of text rather than real text, such as a logo or a scanned signature. Snapshot is the right tool there, since it copies an area as a picture.

And if you only need a word or two to search for elsewhere, the double-click is the quickest route of all.

These are small habits, but they turn copying from a PDF into something you no longer think about, which is exactly how it should be.