Text selection on Mac

By Mayank, 1 May, 2024

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I am unable to select and copy text in preview and apple books on mac. The text selection is turned on in Preview. I can not select text by pressing the option key as well as the finger gestures on both the applications. It is working fine on Safari on websites and html documents. Please help me with this if someone knows what is the issue here.

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Comments

By Jason White on Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 16:45

Do the VoiceOver text selection commands help?
VO-Return starts and ends selection.

By Mayank on Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 16:45

It does work sometimes but not always, it might be because of the pdf which is not a good scan, maybe.
I also wanted to know how to move line by line and sentence by sentence in Apple Books on Mac. I can only read paragraphs and when I interact with the paragraph I can only move word by word and character.

By Bruce Harrell on Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 16:45

Have VoiceOver read the text you want to select. Then, press Vo-shift-C to capture what had just been read. After that, use command-v to paste.

By Jason White on Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 16:45

Creators of PDF documents can set an option that disallows copying of text to the clipboard. I don't know whether Apple Books has the same feature.

By Brian on Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 16:45

It is possible this is due to the DRM on Apple Books. Some Kindle books also have this, and those books will not work with screen readers.

HTH.