Improved table copy

[belg4mit]

I really appreciate how speedy and no non-sense Sumatra is. However, it's insistence on copying cells in a highlighted table as a stream of sentences rather than the standard tab-separated values means I often to resort to other readers to extract data from files. It would be lovely if I could copy a table in Sumatra and then paste the text into a spreadsheet as in other PDF tools.

[GitHubRulesOK]

PDF rarely have any tabular sense, each letter is precision placed on its own or in small groups without tabs (and often without spaces between word groups) hence NO TABS to copy. What a PDF to TEXT editor may do is inject a comma or a space or spaces or tabs to make a csv or tsv file.

This is the cause of thousands of questions on StackOverflow or Super User etc. because I can GUARANTEE none will work all of the time. It would be a damn good AI to outperform my 5 decades of experience selling that "Magic Potion" solution.

So, what is practical?
You can convert the PDF binary co-ordinates into spacebars, and the simplest fastest tool is 3+ decades old PDFtoTEXT it can handle UTF conversions too. pdftotext -nopgbrk -layout -enc UTF-8 ....other options in.pdf out whatever

Then for CSV import to eXcel you can inject commas where there are none. Currently trying to do that with PowerShell is a challenge but possible. see https://stackoverflow.com/a/79683759/10802527