macOS 26 preview does not allow highlighting on much of text

There's definitely something odd with Preview, specifically the blue boxes that show up. The ability to select text in Preview has always depended on the way the PDF is generated. For some pdfs it works well, others less so. I do seem to get better text selection than you, but it ignores the table break and there are still the extraneous boxes. Paste into Word on the right.

If Preview is problematic, you can try Adobe Acrobat Reader (in this case perhaps because the Chevy pdf was made with Acrobat Distiller from Adobe InDesign, though it was done on a Mac). For the pdf you linked, it properly selects the right table (and the paste into Word reflected that, with just the right table though the column breaks were ignored).

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Make sure you have Tools > Text Selection active. Seems to work fine for me.

Copied the selected text in the screenshot, it goes to the Clipboard as expected.

These are exclusively public, user supported communities. No Apple employees participate here and only proper feedback links get to the the product development teams. Continuing to post about issues with Preview in Tahoe 26.0.1 is just noise as we fellow users cannot fix it, and Apple won't see it.

Even a change in the tools that the originator of the PDF uses, could impact how well Preview can select and annotate text passages. PDF document internals are a quagmire. Not only is Apple's Preview incapable of handling all PDF documents, the PDFKit/CoreGraphics development teams sometimes introduce bugs in it. I keep a current version of Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on the occasion when Preview has issues.

Neither Preview, nor Acrobat Reader are PDF Editors. One does not need PDF editing features for PDF annotation. When PDF editing is necessary, there are single-purchase, lower cost PDF Editors (e.g. Code Industry's Master PDF Editor) available for those that are sensitive to subscriptions. Recently, if not presently, stacksocial dot com was offering a Microsoft Office 2021 Home and Student plus a 3-year subscription to Adobe Acrobat (classic) for 89USD. That same three-year subscription from Adobe would run 324USD.

I think this bug belongs to the mode set in apperance also in 26.1. I always use dark mode, not automatic or light.

In dark mode highlight or mark text does not work for preview, but when I switch to light mode I see the 'grey' highlighted text. Behaviour is also the same in dark liquid glass mode and set to tinted.

Anyone else?

I was having the same issue. The trick that fixed my issue is the following: Print it and save it as a pdf (or export it to a pdf). This copy behaves properly with annotation tools.

Does it work for you on a file with more complicated formatting? Try this one:

Try the table on the right side of page 26 (or any other similarly formatted pages). I tried with Text Selection both active and inactive and get some really funky selections:

Seems better with the left-side tables, but not the right-side ones.

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Doug.Smith wrote:

Not a huge deal, just coincidence that I happened to be doing this right before and after the update.

Worth reporting to Apple:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

I typically wait until the x.1 or x.2 update to move to a new major macOS version, but this time I decided to upgrade immediately on one of my Macs. This is the fun that comes with that choice.

MacOS 26.0.1 still has this problem. I am able to highlight text on page one. Page two only gets blue selection boxes but nothing will highlight, no matter what tools are selected. Page three allows for highlighting. If it was a problem with tool selection, then pages one and three would also have blue boxes and no highlights. The PDF is from the Print dialog, PDF dropdown, Open in Preview. Used to work fine prior to MacOS 26.

Selecting text for highlighting on page two. As soon as I release the mouse, the box and highlight vanish.

Selecting text for highlighting on page one. The highlight appears immediately, no blue box, and the highlight remains afterwards.

Preview does not allow you to highlight text in a chart in a pdf. I tried reprinting to a pdf made no difference. Apple needs to fix this now.

Cool. Thank you for checking / confirming. What is notable is that I was highlighting text in the Chevy pdf just before the Tahoe update (the OS, not the truck, lol) without any problem in Preview. After the Tahoe update this text selection issue cropped up in Preview. I also downloaded a fresh copy of the pdf after the update in case my initial pdf was corrupted during the update, but that didn't seem to make a difference.

Not a huge deal, just coincidence that I happened to be doing this right before and after the update.

Same issue. Same files from before and after Tahoe. Tried running it through OCR and no change. Never an issue before and Adobe handles it okay still (both pre and post update). It'd be great to be able to use the new Preview on iPad as it's something I used to highlight documents daily on my Mac.

I'm having the same issue. I check credit card and bank statements and highlight confirmed transactions. Never a problem with Preview but now it will not highlight the currency amounts. Annoying. I also tried the trick of printing to a PDF, but the result was the same.

The 26.0.1 update was a security patch, not really a set of bug fixes. Expect those in 26.1, though most likely not all bugs will be addressed and it will depend on where this one falls in Apple’s list of priorities.

Thank you for your suggestion, @abis99. Alas, it only worked in a few text locations for me. Is there a print setting I'd need to check?

I also tried exporting the document with different settings, but to no avail. Even if its flattened to jpg, Preview will create boxes, in which I am unable to select text. ☹️