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Can't highlight text in a PDF in Preview--it just selects entire page

This is a seemingly simple task that never seems to work for me.

I've perused the WWW and followed all recommendations--see attached screen shots.

What am I doing wrong?

This one shows that the PDF file is un-encrypted and I have full permissions.


This one shows that it is indeed saved as a PDF file (and I'm not trying to edit an image).


And this one show that I've selected everything needed to be able to highlight text.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.6

Posted on Feb 18, 2022 7:35 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 18, 2022 7:42 AM

If that is a scanned PDF document, any text that you see is contained internally as a JPG image and it cannot receive annotations, as would be the case if the PDF were generated from a document opened in an application. You would need a PDF Editor (not Preview) to apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert that image text to actual text.

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 18, 2022 7:42 AM in response to Schmoodli

If that is a scanned PDF document, any text that you see is contained internally as a JPG image and it cannot receive annotations, as would be the case if the PDF were generated from a document opened in an application. You would need a PDF Editor (not Preview) to apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert that image text to actual text.

Can't highlight text in a PDF in Preview--it just selects entire page

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