Preview cannot highlight text or select text when detected as a Table in a pdf file

Although in Tahoe 26.3/26.3.1, one can single-click a PDF table cell to select it, and subsequently drag to select its cell text content, Preview blocks annotation (including highlight) of that selected text in the table. Nothing you can do about this except to send direct feedback to the macOS product team requesting a feature update to Preview. Posting the issue here is not seen by any Apple product teams as they do not participate in these public communities.

The current (25.1.21265) Adobe Acrobat Reader application readily allows direct highlighting of table cell text in the same PDF document. The bad news is that Acrobat Reader will not let you save that highlight change owing to an error dialog indicating a number is out of range. Not to the original or different folder. One may need a true PDF editor to highlight and save the PDF.

If one uses the PDFDocument framework to dump the text from the PDF, the individual lines of the PDF table text are also output along with any surrounding PDF text external to the table.

Tested: macOS 26.3.1

Same here. As a workaround - Chrome PDF viewer does the highlighting. Maybe less convenient, but it works.

As a follow-on to my previous post, I have written and tested an AppleScript/Objective-C script that does apply a user-specified highlight color to found text in a PDF table. The only means to subsequently remove the highlighted table text would be via Preview's Annotation Inspector, where you select the specific highlight color in the list associated with the table text and then press backspace.

The code searchs the PDF for the string "Tanya Leslie" and applies a (real) yellow highlight:

Tested: macOS 26.3.1