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             TipBITS: How to Avoid Live Text in Preview More Easily

   Adam Engst

   OK, this is embarrassing. After I published '[1]TipBITS: Disable Live
   Text for Easier Selecting in Preview' (5 July 2022), [2]Ken Nellis
   commented that after he read the article, he noticed that Preview in
   macOS 12 Monterey now has three selection-related options in the Tools
   menu: Automatic Selection, Text Selection, and Rectangular Selection.
   Ensuring that Live Text doesn't hijack rectangular selections is that
   easy? Oops.

   I'm so familiar with Preview at this point that I didn't notice the
   change in the menu structure because I rely almost entirely on keyboard
   shortcuts and toolbar buttons and menus. Indeed, when I checked Preview
   on a Mac running the pre-Live Text macOS 11 Big Sur, it had only two
   commands in that menu: Text Selection and Rectangular Selection. Plus,
   the Text Selection command was never previously available when working
   on an image; it was only for selecting text in a PDF. (Rectangular
   selections work in both images and PDFs.) So that's my excuse, weak
   though it may be.

   In the current version of Preview, Automatic Selection is the default,
   and it's what was tripping me up before. In that mode, Preview guesses
   whether you want to select text or draw out a selection rectangle. Most
   of the time, it guesses correctly, but if it starts selecting text and
   you want a rectangle, choose Tools > Rectangular Selection or click the
   selection pop-up menu on the left side of Preview's toolbar.
   Rectangular Selection is the default in that pop-up menu, and merely
   displaying the menu is enough to cause the Tools menu to switch to
   Rectangular Selection as well.

   On the other side of the equation, if you keep getting a selection
   rectangle when you want to select text, choose Tools > Text Selection
   to force Preview to focus on characters.

   My only remaining criticism, and I'll file this with Apple as a feature
   request, is that Preview should never perform a text selection when
   there's a rectangular selection in progress. Live Text annoyed me
   because I would open a screenshot that needed cropping, press Command-A
   to create a rectangular selection around the entire image, and get a
   text selection when I tried to move the blue selection handles.

   If that happens now, I know that I can easily require a rectangular
   selection by clicking the selection pop-up menu, but even that
   shouldn't be necessary. First-world problems, I know!

References

   Visible links
   1. https://tidbits.com/2022/07/05/tipbits-disable-live-text-for-easier-selecting-in-preview/
   2. https://talk.tidbits.com/t/tipbits-disable-live-text-for-easier-selecting-in-preview/19463/6?u=ace

   Hidden links:
   3. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2022/07/Preview-Tools-menu.png
   4. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2022/07/Preview-toolbar-selection-menu.png

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