/t5/acrobat-discussions/selector-tool-as-crosshairs/td-p/11810927Feb 05, 2021
Feb 05, 2021
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The selector tool on my version of Acrobat is presenting as the crosshairs every time I hit "selector" tool. (I'd like to copy or highlight text in my pdfs, and this currently isn't allowing that action.) How do I change it back to the pointer? I've tried several of the other solutions on this site, but none of them have brought my pointer tool.
Might there be a layer or something above the text keeping the cursor from thinking it's over text? It should swap between text and object functionality / look automatically. Is it only on a specific PDF, or all PDFs?
Thanks, Dave. It's happening on the majority of pdfs I open. PDFs exported from my computer's Word docs seem to be okay--I get the regular pointer cursor on those. However, I run into the problem on anything I download from other sources or any image-heavy PDFs. If it's helpful at all, I've attached an example of one of the PDFs that happens on for me.
I opened up your PDF in Acrobat Pro DC on Windows. For me, it appears to be behaving normally - On the back cover, I can select the text, and on the front cover (right), the image has my selection tool as crosshairs... and it switches to the text I-beam over the word CANARIES. This is NOT how yours is behaving? Have you tried to click around to see if that affects the appearance/behavior?
Hi again! Yeah, my selection tool doesn't switch to the text I-beam over the word CANARIES. Clicking around doesn't affect the behavior at all, unless I head to a left-click menu, the toolbar, etc. When I first open a PDF, it automatically chooses the hand tool, and when I switch it to "select tool" the crosshairs appear.
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