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Inspiring
September 8, 2025
Question

Left and right arrows move the cursor rather than move between pages

  • September 8, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 207 views

I almost always use Adobe Acrobat with the Selection Tool active. That normally causes a cursor to show up in the text. When I select the hand tool instead, the cursor in the text turns into a hand to pan.

When the selection tool is active, the cursor shows up in the text. However, the inconvenience of that tool is that when I press the right and left arrows on my keyboard, rather than turn between pages of the PDF as they normally do, they make the cursor move between the individual letters. In the past, I have been able to address this by pressing escape. That makes the cursor disappear from the text and then when I press the left and right arrows on the keyboard, I am able to turn between the pages of the PDF (i.e., when I press the right arrow, I will go from page 2 to Page 3; when I press the left arrow, it goes from page 3 to page 2; etc.).

However, in recent days, pressing escape in Acrobat has not caused the cursor to disappear from the text. Now when I am pressing the arrow keys, it is just moving the cursor within a paragraph. I have to manually click on the buttons in the top menu bar of Acrobat to move to the next page or to the previous page. I want to avoid having to use the mouse to click and want the left and right arrows to turn between the pages.

How can I restore the previous function where pressing escape makes the cursor disappear and allows the arrow keys on the keyboard to shift between pages?

1 reply

PDF Automation Station
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 9, 2025

Press Esc twice.