PDF Column selection in OS X

Command-option-select:

Macintouch: Mac OS X 10.4.6

David Barnett

If you need to select a column of text from a PDF you can do this by holding down the and keys while dragging the selection in either Preview or Adobe Reader. This trick also works in TextEdit, Mail and Stickies. This is the same convention that is used in Alpha.

I suspect it is a feature of Cocoa applications using the standard text window and PDF handling.