Force text-only selection, i.e. disable box-selection?

[morganw4118444]

Acrobat seems to be massively finicky about the way you move the mouse when trying to select text.  Specifically, it seems as though you have to not only initially click precisely within the character-width-and-height zone of a stripe of text, but also have to move the mouse in a perfect horizontal line in order to engage the text-selection mode. 

Thus I am having a problem selecting text, which is the only thing I ever select in a PDF file, because Acrobat keeps interpreting it as a box I am trying to draw, and this function is incapable of selecting text.

Is there any way to disable the box-drawing selection mode?  I do not use it, ever, and it is getting in the way of basic functionality for my use of Acrobat.

[ls_rbls]

Hi,

Please identify which  selection tool are you using: the hand tool or the Select Tool ( the arrow).

The behavior you're describing seems to happen you are working on a PDF document using the Prepare Form tool.

Everytime you click on any area that is not an object field it will switch to Edit Text & Images automatically. 

To avoid that, and to make sure that selecting and copying text from a PDF document is all you need Go to  Edit--->>> Preferences --->>> General. 

In the Basic Tools section un-tic the box that says "Make Select Tool select images before text"

Also, identify that you're not using Edit PDF tool

 or Prepare Form tools as you work with your PDFs and navigate through the pages that you're selecting text from.

Another suggestion you may want to try is to open the Page Thumbnail view pane (left margin of your workspace). Select all thumbnailed pages, right-click on the selction, select Page Properties, and the tick the radio button that says " Use Document Structure".

Another suggestion is to just hover the Selection Tool arrow pointer to the first word of the line of text you intend to select, and instead of keeping the button pressed and moving the mouse pointer  just double-click the left button to select the whole word or triple-click to select the entire sentence in that line.

Four rapid clicks will select an entire paragraph or all text in the current working page.

It is faster to work with a combination of mouse gestures and keyboard short cuts for large documents with a lot of text.

If I just want to select and entire line without fighting the mouse point-and-click accuracy of the mouse device, for  example, I triple-click to select the entire line of text of interest.

And if I need to select additional lines below or above that line of text, then I press the Shift key+ the up or down, left or right arrow keys to select more carefully over the sapeces or characters I want my selecrion to end, OR, tap the arrow key character by character for a.more precise selection of where I wish to end that selection of text.

I also use the  Tab key to move accross my field objects, and use shift+tab to move back accross the field objects.

[morganw4118444]

Thanks for your reply!

What I've been using is the default tool that is selected when Acrobat loads.  It appears to be the select tool.  The documents I am working on are not forms and I'm not aware of having selected a prepare-forms tool at any point.  I believe I also confirmed I am not selecting or using the Edit PDF tool.  The "Make Select Tool select images before text" option was already unchecked.  The triple/quadruple click selection mechanism is interesting but it is not a fine enough selection tool (it goes from whole-line to whole-page-including-header/footer-and-footnotes with nothing in between).

I use cursoring/tabbing a lot so that approach seems the best workaround for me from your list of suggestions.  I will read more carefully at a later time and see if anything else works.

Still, I think it would be an important feature request to be able to disable the non-text-selection functions entirely rather than engage in somewhat tricky and sub-optimal workarounds.  There must be an absolutely huge portion of the user base that uses PDFs for nothing other than reading and editing text, and for those people, the box-select tool appears to have no usefulness at all.

[ls_rbls · Accepted solution]

You're welcome. Happy to help.

Just yesterday I posted another thread for a user that wanted to make the Hand tool the default selection tool.

See here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat/make-hand-default-cursor/m-p/10847112#M235530 

I think you can try this in combination with opening your documents in Read Mode.

There's more settings that may be of your interest in the following guidance:

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/viewing-pdfs-viewing-preferences.html 

To formally address  a suspected bug in Adobe Acrobat/Reader, or  to voice up a feature request use the following link and complete the wish form :

https://www.adobe.com/products/wishform.html