PDF text selection broken: only selects left half

Question

PDF text selection broken: only selects left half

In Preview and other apps that use its PDF engine (Bookends, Devonthink, etc.), the text layer is missing its right half. This holds for about 50% of the PDFs I have downloaded from JSTOR and other places. I have tried forcing a fresh OCR using PDFpenPro, to no avail. This is what triple-click (paragraph select, which acts as line select here) and drag down selects:

Here is the second page using triple-click and drag down:

What gets sent to Clipboard when you Copy:

Allegory is, in this sense, perpetually renews the writ thinks it does not need, the Allegory insists on a continu is not listened to, allegory d The humanistic method is depends on texts. In this, it only exegeticizes metaphoric

Only about the left half of the text is recognized. Is this a Retina issue? I am running OS 10.13.6 on a 2015 MBP. But I also tried it on a Mac mini 2019 and the highlighting (selecting) results are the same.

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.13

Posted on Jan 27, 2020 11:49 AM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Jan 27, 2020 4:39 PM in response to PlasmaticDragon

I've seen this before, I can't remember the fix if there was one.

Does Adobe Acrobat Reader DC do better?

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/install-reader-dc-mac-os.html

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,392 points

Jan 27, 2020 12:01 PM in response to PlasmaticDragon

A triple-click on a paragraph in Preview with High Sierra 10.13.6, and on Mojave 10.14.6 only selects the very first line of the paragraph. I suggest you click at the beginning of the paragraph that you want to select, and drag to the end of intended content. That works — unless your PDF is inherently damaged, or contains content that Preview is incapable of presenting accurately.

As you know, you won't be able to select the text of an image in the PDF either.

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Answer 3

Jan 27, 2020 2:49 PM in response to VikingOSX

Hello! Thanks for your reply.

I shouldn't have mentioned "triple-click." I was merely being pedantic. All modes of cursor dragging yield the same result. I mentioned "triple-click" only because, in matters of text-layer selection, it is known to select nooks and crannies that the dragging method sometimes cannot reach. In other words, it is liable to select more text than a char-by-char drag method.

About half of my PDFs have this problem. All fresh downloads from PubMed, JSTOR, and so on. Not damaged.

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PDF text selection broken: only selects left half

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