Sometimes in my research I need to extract tabular data from a pdf paper. I can copy and paste the table into an Emacs buffer but the data is generally not formatted in a usable way. Luckily Emacs has a wealth of tools to reformat this sort of data.
Here is an animated gif illustrating some tools I use to do this (of course there are lots of other ways to do the same thing).
In the animation I use the following tools
C-x h
to select the whole buffer.C-c |
to runorg-table-create-or-convert-from-region
to convert the region to an org table. This doesn’t get me all the way to where I want to be, but I find it helpful to see the data clearly.M-S-<left>
to delete some unwanted columnsmc/mark-next-like-this
from multiple cursors to give me a cursor on each line (I bind this toM-.
)M-f
to move forward by wordshrink-whitespace
to remove whitespace (I bind this toM-SPACE
)C-c -
to runorg-table-insert-hline
to add a nice horizontal line to my table
This restructures the data in the way I need, and I can now use org-table-export
to export to other useful formats.