HowTo: Copying an Image from a PDF File

Subscriber Glenn Wilkes wrote to comment on my PDF article in the September 21st email newsletter:

Enjoyed your PDF article in newsletter. Question: On a PDF page with 4 diagrams, can you highlight one and move it only to Word or to another document? How?

There are several alternatives. The first is the easiest, but requires that you have Adobe Acrobat (the program that makes the PDF files, not Adobe Reader, the viewing program). With Adobe Acrobat, you could save the file in Word format — if the creator did not set any of the digital rights management (DRM) measures to prevent you doingg that.

The other way can be done by anyone, but it takes a few more steps.

First, you open Adobe Acrobat (or any other PDF reader like Foxit Reader) to full screen. Then scroll to center the image you want, and zoom the image to the size you want, or larger.

You can always shrink an image and keep almost all the "information" in them. Howeve, when you zoom, you ever have more data in the image than you started with. That's how you can get blocky images when you zoom too much. Adobe Acrobat keeps more information on the image than it actually displays, so you can often zoom and still get a reasonable image.

Once you have centered and zoomed the image to the size you want (or the best you can use alt-PrntScrn to capture only the active window.

Now, start a good graphics program, such as Irfanview or even Google's Picasa, and paste into a new image.

Use the crop tool in the graphics program to select only the image, then its copy function (usually Edit > Copy or Alt-C to copy the image.

Finally, paste it into Word.

Copyright © 2008 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.