Re: idea: Copying/pasting tables

[Kristian Høgsberg <krh redhat com>]

Brent Smith wrote:
...

> 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?

This is actually quite complicated to implement.  It would definitely be 
a nice and useful feature, but you should understand that PDF is a 
fairly low-level file format.  The contents of a PDF file is not on the 
level of "make a 3 by 7 table with a grey background here" but rather 
"draw a grey box, draw this line, draw that line, put this glyph here, 
put this other glyph next to it, draw this other line".  So if you want 
to copy and paste a table as a table, your viewer must be able to figure 
that "oh, these lines connect to form a box, and these glyphs that I 
drew before are all in that box... this must be a table cell".

Hope you get the idea... it's a pretty hard problem to solve.

cheers,
Kristian