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

[Guy K. Haas]

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