Can't Copy Text From a PDF on Mac? Why It Happens and 4 Fixes

Can't copy text from a PDF on your Mac? You open it in Preview, try to drag across a paragraph, and nothing highlights. Or it highlights, but Copy is greyed out. The fix depends on which of three problems you have, and it takes about ten seconds to tell them apart.

Step 1: work out which problem you have

To be sure about the causes, we built two test files from the same one-page letter:

• A scanned version (a photo of the printed page saved as a PDF): 0 selectable characters. There's no text in it at all, just a picture.
• A restricted version (a normal text PDF saved with copying disabled): 554 characters of real text, but the file's permission flag says copying isn't allowed.

From the outside they behave almost the same: you can't copy. Here's how to tell them apart in Preview:

What you see	What it means
The cursor never turns into a text cursor; dragging draws a box	Scanned or image-only PDF
Text highlights, but Edit > Copy is greyed out	Copy restrictions
Text highlights but pastes as gibberish or empty	Broken font encoding (common in old or exported PDFs)
Asks for a password before opening	Encrypted PDF. You need the password

For restrictions, open Tools > Show Inspector and click the lock tab. It lists whether copying is allowed.

Fix 1: scanned PDF? Use Live Text in Preview

Since macOS Monterey, Preview can read text in images, and that includes scanned PDF pages. Hover over the text until the cursor becomes an I-beam, drag across the words, and press ⌘C. If nothing selects, turn on Tools > Text Selection.

It works page by page, for selecting passages. It won't turn the whole document into a searchable PDF; you need a dedicated PDF OCR app for that. For a full walkthrough with real accuracy results, see how to copy text from a scanned PDF on Mac.

Fix 2: copy restrictions? Ask, or capture the passage you need

The author chose to block copying. The clean fix is to ask the sender for an unrestricted copy. For a short quote for your own notes, you can take a screenshot of the passage and read it with OCR. You're copying the pixels on your screen, not unlocking the file.

We screenshotted our restricted letter and ran it through Apple's text recognition. It came back word for word, with one exception worth knowing: both £ signs were read as €. Always check currency symbols and numbers in anything financial.

Fix 3: broken encoding? Re-OCR the page

If the text selects but pastes as nonsense (ÿþÅ and similar), the PDF's fonts don't map characters properly. Ignore the broken text layer and read the page visually instead: take a screenshot of the passage (⌘⇧4), open it in Preview and select the text with Live Text. OCR reads the pixels, so the broken encoding doesn't matter.

Fix 4: the faster way for any of the above

If you hit this regularly, a screen OCR shortcut skips the screenshot-open-select routine. With Screenshot Text, press ⌘⇧7, drag over the passage in any PDF viewer (Preview, Chrome's PDF viewer, Acrobat, a web portal), and the text is on your clipboard. Recognition runs on your Mac, so confidential documents stay on your Mac.

Use the default (Normal) mode for documents. Leave Optimize for code off: that's for code, and it tends to reformat ordinary text.

Before you paste: three checks

OCR on documents is very good, but in our tests the same handful of errors kept appearing:

1. Currency symbols: £ read as €, or as E or f on a blurry scan.
2. 1, I and l: "1 April" became "I April" on a low-quality scan.
3. Account and reference numbers: check every digit; never trust OCR blindly for payments.

If a document is important, compare the pasted text against the original before you use it.

For every way to get text out of a PDF on a Mac, including locked and scanned files, see how to grab text from a PDF on Mac.