You’ll often see odd breaks, or no breaks at all, and styles will be lost. While you can select text in a PDF, chances are that this text will be seriously munged. You may need to copy a paragraph, a page or more, and edit it in a Microsoft Word document, or in another word processor or text editor. While the PDF file format is a great tool for sharing documents while retaining their formatting and for assuring that documents aren’t changed (contracts, for instance), sometimes you need to use the text from a PDF.