Issue with selecting text and copying in PDFs (Preview)

I'd say the main problem is with the color Graphite in the setting Settings > Aspect > Highlight color. I have the same problem, and I believe it's a bug from MacOS Tahoe 26.0.1, but for the moment, you can change the highlight color and it will work.

alenudy wrote:

Update: Issue resolved. Thanks everyone for all your suggestions.

After upgrading to Tahoe, I was only restarting my computer, attempted that a few times but it didn't help. To my surprise, turning the computer off completely for a while and then turning it on again actually helped 🤦‍♂️

Good computing alenudy ! Thanks for your update here.

Yes always recommend to shut down and restart more than once after a point update and especially after a macOS upgrade.

You may also have a PDF where the privilege for copying text and graphics is locked. You can see that in the Preview Inspector (cmd+i) : lock symbol panel. If that is green, you may have a scanned PDF that has not been OCR'd to provide selectable text. If this is the case, see the next paragraph to solve this.

With that PDF open, choose File menu > Export… and choose a different name for the exported PDF. Check the embed text option (which is Apple's obfuscation for OCR), and once it has exported, close the current PDF. Open that newly exported PDF and see if you can select text.

There is nothing wrong with an unscanned PDF as I just annotated text with Preview 11 in Tahoe 26.0 not more than a half hour ago.

Issue resolved:

1. Go to System Settings → Appearance.
2. Under Theme / Colour (or “Accent / Highlight”), ensure “Graphite” is selected for the highlight colour (or highlight + accent if unified).
3. Then open a text-document (e.g. TextEdit), select some text and verify the selection colour appears grey-ish rather than blue.
4. If it looks too faint/invisible:
5. 
   

• • Go to System Settings → Accessibility → Display and check Increase contrast or Reduce transparency. Try toggling them to see if readability improves.
  • Consider switching from Graphite to a more saturated colour (e.g., Red, Green) so the selection stands out better.

Text Selection should work now! If it doesn't, try restarting your computer!

alenudy wrote:

After updating to macOS Tahoe I'm no longer able to select text in PDFs and as a result also unable to copy text from PDFs. Double clicking on text or clicking and dragging the mouse etc. - none of it works anymore. The text also doesn't get highlighted and there is simply no reaction.

The option to select the text is enabled (Tools > Text Selection).

PDFs are not locked because these are the same files I was using before updating the OS.

Try a true PDFeditor and compare your results.

for Preview.app —

To be proactive you can file a bug report / submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

here are many, here are a few examples:

Acrobat Reader / Adobe Acrobat DC

https://get.adobe.com/reader/

PDFpen / Nitro

https://pdfpen.com/pdfpen/

pdfExpert

https://pdfexpert.com/

Master PDF Editor

https://code-industry.net/get-masterpdfeditor/

PDFgear

https://www.pdfgear.com

100% this. I've tried to copy text from a PDF in "blind mode" (like the problem is highlight, not the function itself), and it works. To be fair, there is no "Aspect" section inside Preview settings, so I couldn't solve the issue.

Preview is part of macOS, which it seems you need to reinstall.

How to reinstall macOS - Apple Support

FWIW, text selection and copying are normal in Preview on my Mac running Tahoe.

The Shutting down and starting up again is a temp fix. I live in the pdf environment, I have to do this every time I open up a new pdf or if I close the same pdf and open it again.