Taking a snapshot of part of a PDF in PDF by Zaweba

Sometimes the thing you want from a PDF isn't text at all. It's a chart for a slide, a floor plan for an email, a product photo for a catalogue or a corner of a drawing to show a colleague. PDF by Zaweba has two tools in the Edit menu for this, and they do slightly different jobs.

Take a snapshot

Edit > Take a snapshot copies an area of the page as a picture. Drag a box round what you want and it goes on the clipboard, ready to paste into a document, a presentation, an email or an image editor. Or click a page to copy the whole page as a picture.

A snapshot copies what you see, mixed together: text, lines, pictures and any comments on top. That makes it the right tool for things that only make sense as a whole. A chart built from lines and labels, a table with shading, a signed box on a form, a map with a key. You get one picture of the lot, looking just as it does on the page.

It is also the answer when text won't copy as text, for example a heading drawn as a picture, or when you want to quote a passage exactly as it was printed, fonts and all, rather than retyping it.

Copy a picture

Edit > Copy a picture works differently. Click a picture on the page and it is copied at its own size. That means the picture as it is stored in the PDF, not as it happens to appear at your current zoom.

This is the one to use when you want the actual photo or illustration. A product shot in a catalogue, a logo in a letter, a photograph in a report: copy it this way and you get the original picture, often far sharper than a snapshot of it would be at a normal zoom. It also leaves out any text or lines lying over the top, because it takes the picture itself rather than the area of the page.

Picture or page: which to pick

Ask yourself whether you want the picture or the look of the page. If you want the photo to reuse, Copy a picture gives you the cleanest result. If you want what the page shows, with labels and lines and everything layered together, Take a snapshot is right.

With a snapshot, zoom matters. If the result looks soft when you paste it, zoom in before you take it so the area fills more of the screen. Snapshot also suits small areas: a single cell, a stamp, a line of a contract that you want to quote word for word.

Using the results

Both tools put the picture on the clipboard, so the next step is a paste. It goes straight into an email, a slide, a word processor or a painting program. From there you can crop it, add arrows or save it as a file.

The clipboard also works the other way round inside PDF by Zaweba. Pages can be inserted from the clipboard, including a copied picture, so a snapshot from one PDF can become a page of another.

Remember that a picture of text is no longer text. If someone needs to search, edit or copy the words afterwards, give them the text with Ctrl+C or a table with copy as table instead, and keep snapshots for the things that really are pictures.

It is a small pair of tools, but between them they cover nearly every reason people reach for a screen capture program while reading a PDF.