PDF XChange Forum

Usually I start with the Hand Tool active, maybe due to some preference I've chosen, I don't know, but don't care.

Until recently I've always been able to use View -> Select Text, then use the mouse to select text in the file being viewed. Recently, I have sometimes been having the mouse cursor turn into something that looks like some sort of four pointed cross. Moving this cursor around does nothing unless the left mouse button is held down at the same time. Then moving the cursor draws a rectangle. What is this rectangle for? Why does this only happen in some files? How can I always select text instead of drawing this rectangle?

This behavior may have started when I installed Version 8.0, build 331.0 or more generally may be a difference in behavior between Version 7 and Version 8, but I'm not sure of either.

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the post - If you are not able to select text, this would suggest that there is no text in the document, but you have an image of text (e.g. a scanned document). Please try the Convert --> OCR Pages feature and see if that helps.

Thanks,\

Thanks. Looks like you're right. I don't recall seeing before the type of cursor and rectangle drawing that I described even on parts of a document with text that are not selectable text such as blank lines, but maybe I just never noticed.

Also, I see now that apparently "printing" to PDF-XChange Lite creates an image rather than a document with text. Maybe that's always been the case and I just never noticed.

Not my main issue, but out of curiosity what does that rectangle drawing do that's useful? Anything?

No worries Bob! Usually the type of content that is printed depends on what is sent to the printer. Chrome and Firefox, for example, tend to send a raster image to the printer as they're anticipating printing to a physical printer and this tends to produce better output to paper. Printing from the Editor (a PDF) to a PDF printer can cause strange things to happen to resulting PDF, as you're reapplying conversion and compression algorithms; this is why we usually don't recommend printing a PDF to PDF.

Not my main issue, but out of curiosity what does that rectangle drawing do that's useful? Anything?

This is called a marquee select and is so that text or content can be selected in non-linear ways. e.g.: Cheers,