idea: Copying/pasting tables

[Brent Smith <bsmith ucdavis edu>]

I recently sent the following message to the xpdf developer, but I
have not yet heard back from him.

---snip---
Hello,

   I'm writing to inquire what would be involved in getting this
kind of functionality in xpdf or one of it's derivative works.  I'm
not requesting that you implement it, I just figured this question
has probably come up before, and there is a reason why it's not
available.

Basically I'm looking to be able to copy/paste tables within a
pdf file to a spreadsheet program like oocalc/gnumeric or into a
word processor such as abiword/oowriter.  Is this possible, and
if not what is the barrier from creating functionality like this?
Acrobat seems to be able to do this on the Windows platform, although
how it is implemented is beyond me.  I figure that there is a
certain distinct set of instructions that are generated for tables
in PDFs, and the Acrobat program parses this and copies it
into a special paste buffer.  Implementation on linux should be
pretty easy since openoffice programs use an open XML format.  The
only hard part would be detecting the tables in the pdf instructions...

If you could give me any insight on this, I would be more than willing
to look into implementing this functionality if it doesn't exist
already.

Thanks for your time,

-- Brent Smith <bsmith ucdavis edu>
---snip---

Would this be a possibility for evince?

--
Brent Smith <bsmith ucdavis edu>
BME Computer Support <bme-support ucdavis edu>
530.754.8029