Originally published at: TipBITS: How to Avoid Live Text in Preview More Easily - TidBITS
Mea culpa! It turns out that Apple provided commands for controlling whether dragging in Preview draws out a rectangular selection or selects text. Adam revisits his previous article to set the record straight.
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I actually have Selection in my toolbar, but unfortunately, unlike the Markup toolbar, it offers no alternate modes at all. So I can’t use it to switch between text and rectangular select. If I hit it, menu selection jumps from automatic to rectangular, but I see no obvious way to get clicking it to change to text selection or back to automatic. A bit useless this way for me I’m afraid. If it instead offered a toggle that would make the toolbar icon much more useful to me.
Oh @#$%^&*, I give up. I just took a screenshot and when I used Select All to create a rectangular selection to crop it, Live Text still kicked in. And it stayed kicked in, even when I chose Tools > Rectangular Selection, and even when I chose Rectangular Selection from the toolbar. I was able to reproduce the problem once with the same file, but not a second time. I’ll stick with turning off Live Text entirely.
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