Is this something that you saw changing in Mojave’s version of Preview? I’m not surprised, but I’m not sure that I can say that Preview has always selected text 100% reliably either.
I’ve sometimes thought that there may be issues within particular PDFs that cause this, so it’s conceivable it’s the generation step that’s the problem.
Adam,
Is this something that you saw changing in Mojave’s version of Preview?
I cannot be 100% sure – I can’t back-off to High Sierra to test; I have never noticed this problem prior to Mojave.
I am creating the PDFs myself using Pages so it is possible that Pages is producing garbage but I personally doubt this. I can select correctly in Adobe so I think that the content is good. Unfortunately, with Adobe, I lose the tabs and leading space formatting so that doesn’t work for me…
Kind regards,
ac
Back when we were doing Take Control, I was more familiar with PDF generation issues, but since I haven’t been dealing with it for over two years, I can’t dredge details out of my memory.
Some test things to try include creating the PDF in different ways (like an Export command versus a Print to PDF command) and, if you have Acrobat Pro, running the PDF through various cleanup tasks (like tagging, or even just a Save As).
It may or may not reveal anything, but it would be interesting to see if a PDF that was generated differently or edited in Acrobat Pro showed different selection behavior.