Copy-and-paste from FrameMaker PDF to text editor, preserving leading spaces?

Subject: Copy-and-paste from FrameMaker PDF to text editor, preserving leading spaces?
From: "Guy K. Haas" <guy -at- hiskeyboard -dot- com>
To: TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2006 22:16:45 -0700

If I create a document in FrameMaker, and it contains some blocks of sample code...

and the code indents blocks for readability...

and I want the reader to be able to copy from the code material and paste into a Plain Old Text Editor...

is there any way you know of to do this in a manner that will retain the indentions?
----

I'm wrestling with conversion of a book that used our old FrameMaker template, but added some customizations. I'm moving the content over to a new template set. The code paragraphs (with overrides) in the old template used tabs to indent. The new template has a different paragraph style for each level of indention, and defines no tabs in any of the code paragraph styles.

My template-design sense would be that code paragraph styles should be used to specify the indention level of the entire block of code, indenting it to correspond with the body paragraphs it follows:

Code para at the Body para left margin

CodeIndent1 para at the BodyIndent1 para left margin

etc

and then each flavor of code para should have tab stops defined on the same grid. The code is in a fixed-width font, so as long as the body para indention system and the character width of the code font can be made to align (reasonably), I'd be happy.

But when I select text lines of the PDF that contain code and copy them to the clipboard, then paste them into a text editor, all leading spaces are omitted.

Ideas?

--Guy K. Haas
Software Exegete in Silicon Valley
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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