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Mouse won't highlight text properly

  • 2 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Highlighting with the mouse is full of glitches. It never works right. It either stops highlighting or highlights opposite the direction I'm moving the mouse.

I need to summarize a recent medical encounter; the hospital's 234 pages are out of temporal order and have many repeats. I want to put it in time order and delete the repeats. It's a PDF, and since I can't use Acrobat anymore, I read PDFs in Firefox.

Not once have I been able to mark a section of text properly. There seem to be some forbidden areas: I highlight what I can, transfer it, then go back for the rest, but it won't highlight.

Ctl-A highlights it. I often do that and delete the excess, but that's inconvenient.

I can open the same file in xpdf and mark without trouble, but I don't like xpdf.

For this doc, I converted the PDF to text with pdf2text, but it's harder to read. I identify target text in Firefox, then find it in the text version, use emacs to copy from the original to my summary.

I've tried a fresh battery in the mouse. Every other app works.

Highlighting with the mouse is full of glitches. It never works right. It either stops highlighting or highlights opposite the direction I'm moving the mouse. I need to summarize a recent medical encounter; the hospital's 234 pages are out of temporal order and have many repeats. I want to put it in time order and delete the repeats. It's a PDF, and since I can't use Acrobat anymore, I read PDFs in Firefox. Not once have I been able to mark a section of text properly. There seem to be some forbidden areas: I highlight what I can, transfer it, then go back for the rest, but it won't highlight. Ctl-A highlights it. I often do that and delete the excess, but that's inconvenient. I can open the same file in xpdf and mark without trouble, but I don't like xpdf. For this doc, I converted the PDF to text with pdf2text, but it's harder to read. I identify target text in Firefox, then find it in the text version, use emacs to copy from the original to my summary. I've tried a fresh battery in the mouse. Every other app works.

All Replies (2)

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Try downloading Firefox from Mozilla, run firefox-bin from the folder and see if you have the same issue. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-release What OS? What Desktop? X11 or Wayland? What version of Firefox? Are you having issues with other PDFs or just that one? See what happens on this site PDFs. https://www.irs.gov/downloads/irs-pdf

Modified by jonzn4SUSE

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I've sen cases with highlighting/selecting text in a PDF file fail in some cases like opening the Find bar with selected text as rendering content in PDF can result to complicated HTML code. You can check this in the Inspector. Firefox versions newer than 115 ESR that you seem to be using can work better (current is 123.0).