In article ,
"Jimmie D" wrote:

A real shame you cant copy and paste text from a pdf file.

I don't know whether you can do this on a Windows computer, but I have
been copying text, as well as pictures, from PDF files with my Macs for
about as long as there have been PDF files. But to copy text, there has
to *BE* text. The Kraus book PDF file, which I have just downloaded,
consists of 568 pages of (scanned) pictures.

One can select, as a picture, any portion (or all) of any one page, copy
it, and paste it into a document in a graphics program. I just did this
with one page of the Kraus "Antennas" book. Such files can be pretty big
-- one page produced a 16.2 MB TIFF file which is more than twice as
large as the entire PDF file for the Kraus "Antennas" book -- but quite
compressible (I compressed that page, losslessly, to 173 kB).

In retirement, for fun and profit, I've been doing pre-publication
debugging (for publishers) of math texts written by others. When I
receive manuscripts, these are usually sent as PDF files from scans of
the actual paper pages produced by the authors. (Paper is used since
often scanners, scissors, and Scotch tape are used to produce some of
the material in Edition (N + 1) from pages from Edition N.) As such, the
files are enormous (thank goodness for a DSL Internet connection) and
not searchable -- there's not a single word in such a file, just a
succession of pictures, one page at a time. Later in the editing and
revision process, I receive PDF files made from TeX files produced by
the typesetters which, except for errors needing to be corrected, are
ready to print. These files, much smaller than the scanned manuscript
files, are searchable, and I can find a word in a few seconds -- much
nicer than eyeballing my way through hundreds of sheets of paper, which
is the way I did it in the old days ten years ago. At this stage of the
game, I can copy and paste text, and I do a lot of that to construct my
reports which get sent back to the authors and editors. Needless to say,
the reports get sent as PDF files, and the nice thing is that Mac- or
UNIX-using authors, Mac users at the typesetting plant, and
Windows-using people at the publishing company, can all read my files
without any problems.

David, ex-W8EZE

--
David Ryeburn

To send e-mail, use "ca" instead of "caz".