PDF Snipping Tool

Text documents on a computer are found under various different formats, mostly depending on the content they hold. For instance, PDF files are preferred for their advanced security options, but content can’t be easily processed or extracted. However, there are specialized programs like PDF Snipping Tool which help in this regard.

As far as the visual design is concerned, the main window holds all elements in an intuitive manner, most of the space representing the document preview, with tools arranged in an upper toolbar. PDF files are the only types of items accepted as input. You work with only one file at a time, and you need to load it through the browse dialog because dropping it over the main window has no effect.

View options make it possible to fit a page to screen, the width, or keep the display at original specifications. Sadly, there’s no navigator for easy preview and selection of pages in a lengthy document. You can enter fullscreen mode for a better reading environment, and even rotate pages.

Snipping tools allow you to grab content of your choice. On the one hand, there’s the possibility to select a particular region on a page to copy either as text or image. These two copy methods are also found as individual snipping options for an entire page.

Hotkey support comes as a neat advantage, thus greatly reducing the effort needed to trigger snipping tools, and even save images. What’s more, there’s a quick save option which automatically sends grabbed content to a custom location under the file format you select. Regardless of the method used, saving can be done under formats like TXT, JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, EPS, WMF, EMF, and TIF.

Last but not least, the application offers the possibility to send content to one of several third-party applications specialized in working with file types you export. At the press of a button content is sent to components of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or CorelDRAW. Needless to say that the target app needs to be already installed.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that PDF Snipping Tool manages to live up to expectations, providing a neat set of functions through which to grab text and images from PDF documents which can either be saved to file, or sent to other processing applications.