Preview 4.0: Inconsistent selection behaviours

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh, Pages
December 11th, 2007 • 2:17 pm

The new Preview application that is part of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is undoubtedly an improvement over previous versions. However, it still suffers from some quirks that suggest a certain lack of polish.

For example, when viewing multiple-page PDF documents, I find that if I use the “Select” tool to select a particular portion of a page, like so:

Selected block on page

and I then copy the selection to the Clipboard and switch to another application to paste the copied block, the behaviour varies depending on the target application.

In Mail and TextEdit, what gets pasted is a PDF of the selected block. However, if I paste the exact same thing in a Pages 3.0 document, instead of inserting the PDF of the copied block, Mac OS X inserts… a PDF of the entire page.

Now, it could be that this a problem with Pages rather than with Preview itself. On the other hand, if Pages is able to retrieve the entire page from the Clipboard, it means that it’s there in the Clipboard, even though when I copied the selection in Preview it only included a small portion of the page.

I am not entirely sure how PDFs of sections of a page are generated. Maybe behind the scenes Preview copies the entire page along with cropping instructions that indicate which portion of the page is supposed to be used when pasting the contents of the Clipboard, and Pages somehow ignores these instructions and pastes the entire page. Maybe.

Whatever is going on behind the scenes, clearly there is something wrong between Preview and Pages.

The other, more Preview-specific problem that I also encountered today has to do with text selection in a PDF file in Preview. Normally, when you switch from the text tool to the selection tool in Preview while viewing a PDF file, Preview deselects the text that is currently selected, so that you can now create a rectangular selection with the selection tool.

However, I find that, if I am already using the selection tool, and I then use Preview’s search tool to find a specific text string, and go to a found occurrence of the text string, the found text is not just highlighted with the fancy new animation thing that Safari’s search tool also uses. It is also selected as a text string.

And if I then use the selection tool to draw a selection rectangle around the section where the found string is, like so:

Selected found text inside selection rectangle

then there is most definitely a problem when I use the “Copy” command. Instead of copying the portion of the PDF that is selected with the selection rectangle, Preview actually copies… the highlighted text.

This is particularly problematic because there is no obvious way to get Preview to deselect the found text occurrence. In actual fact, I found that what I needed to do, once I had gone to the found occurrence that I wanted, was to switch back to the text tool and then again to the selection tool.

This effectively forces Preview to “remember” to deselect the currently selected text, so that I can now draw my selection rectangle without Preview being confused about what is currently selected (the rectangle or the highlighted text).

Then, and only then, I am able to copy the actual selection instead of the highlighted occurrence of the search string.

This is an illustration of the lack of polish that I mentioned earlier on. The currently selected text is properly deselected when switching from the text tool to the selection tool, but it is not deselected once you are already using the selection tool. Of course, the assumption here is that, once the user is using the selection tool, he can no longer select text. But Preview’s search function can, and it still works even when the currently selected tool is the selection tool.

No one at Apple seems to have experienced this scenario and realized that there are two different selections at the same time here, which obviously creates problems when the user tries to copy the selection.


One Response to “Preview 4.0: Inconsistent selection behaviours”

  1. jacobolus says:

    I am not entirely sure how PDFs of sections of a page are generated. Maybe behind the scenes Preview copies the entire page along with cropping instructions that indicate which portion of the page is supposed to be used when pasting the contents of the Clipboard, and Pages somehow ignores these instructions and pastes the entire page. Maybe.

    Yes, that’s right. It’s most certainly a Pages issue. There’s no way to copy just a snippet of a PDF page. You can only copy the whole thing, cropped to some rectangle.

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