Odd copy & paste behavior

DEVONthink
1

I’ve scanned some books into DT3. They are .pdfs to which I applied DT3’s OCR to Searchable PDF command, making them “PDF + Text” files.

If I highlight a section of the page, it copies fine, and pastes fine into another document.

But … if I try to highlight from the first few characters of the page, it selects the entire page, and pastes two things into the new document: an image of the entire page (.jp2), followed by the highlighted text. I can select the .jp2 image of the entire page and delete it, leaving me the pasted text I wanted.

Here are three images to illustrate. First, here’s what it looks like if I highlight a section of the page not including the first few characters.

1
12058×662 270 KB

Now, here’s what it looks like if try to copy just a small section from the first characters of the page. Notice it highlights the entire page.

2
22040×980 475 KB

And finally, here’s what it looks like if I paste into another document. Remember, I highlighted only three lines. But it gives me an image file of the entire page and then the pasted text of the three lines I copied.

3
31368×1848 402 KB

Is there anything I can do about this?

2

You scanned with what application?

3

It varies. Sometimes directly from ScanSnap into DT3. Sometimes - for online books - I take screen grabs and then use DT3 to merge and OCR them. But the problem occurs in either case.

4

This seems to be unfortunately an issue of the PDFkit framework of macOS once again. Does this happen e.g. in Preview.app too?

5

Yes, it’s happening in Preview as well, and also to scans I made outside of DT3. I just scanned a few pages in my ScanSnap and opened it on the desktop, opened it in Preview, and it happened there, so it appears not to be a D3 problem. Thanks for pointing me towards checking it out that way.