PDF selecting text automatically selects half the page

[Ridcully]

In most PDFs when you try to select a word or a sentence the cursor automatically selects everything from there up to the beginning or down to the bottom of the page. It's impossible to select just one word or a few lines. In other PDFs selection works fine just like in reflowable formats.

Does anyone know what causes it or how to convert PDFs so that text can be selected normally? I've had this problem on an older Kindle Touch and now also on the (current?) Paperwhite, and it's a regular annoyance.

[tomsem]

PDFs are not all created alike. In particular, when they start life a scanned images, OCR needs to run in order to overly text. And the software creating this text layer may not take the trouble to create separate regions for each word/letter. Without those, it’s not possible for the software to know where the words are.

You might try a PDF viewer on a computer to see if it has the same problem, and if so, there are probably tools that can fix this issue.

[Ridcully]

Originally Posted by tomsem

PDFs are not all created alike. In particular, when they start life a scanned images, OCR needs to run in order to overly text. And the software creating this text layer may not take the trouble to create separate regions for each word/letter. Without those, it’s not possible for the software to know where the words are.

You might try a PDF viewer on a computer to see if it has the same problem, and if so, there are probably tools that can fix this issue.

Thanks for the insight. I'm not sure if that's the case here tho

I've tried a file that works properly and one that doesn't in Acrobat XI and Sumatra and can't see any differences in how selection works. The only difference I noticed is that the file where selection works properly on Kindle has less spacing between rows, so the row highlights during selection overlap.

The interesting thing is that it's not the whole page that gets selected, only the part from the word I selected up to the beginning or down to the bottom of the page. First the word flashes for a split second, then the whole text flashes as if I just ran the finger to the end of the screen. Whether the selection goes to the top of the page or the bottom depends on the file, not whether the word I wanted to select is in the top half or bottom half of the page.