Unable to select and copy text in Stirling PDF (Windows client)

[Nutoka89]

Hi everyone,

I’m using the Stirling PDF Windows client and I’m unable to select or copy text from any PDF.
What I want to do is simply mark/select text and copy it to the clipboard, but this doesn’t work at all.

I already tried toggling Pan Mode, but it makes no difference — text selection is not possible in either mode.

Any ideas ?

[dosubot[bot]]

This is a known bug affecting Stirling PDF versions 2.1.0 through at least 2.7.2. The Pan Mode toggle has a UI synchronization issue — the button's visual state changes but it doesn't actually switch the underlying interaction mode, leaving the viewer stuck in Pan mode regardless of the toggle state.

The maintainer has acknowledged this and created a tracking issue (#5181), but no fix has been released yet.

Workarounds for extracting text:

• Convert tool – Export your PDF to text formats (TXT, RTF, Markdown) or to Word (DOCX/ODT) to get editable text
• OCR tool – Run OCR on your PDF to regenerate a selectable text layer (works even on non-scanned PDFs)

These aren't ideal for quick copy-paste, but they'll let you extract the text you need until the bug is fixed.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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