Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems Text Selection Weirdness

Ever since updating from Snowy to Yosemite, I've noticed a rather strange problem in a number of different applications.

When selecting text, especially a single character, with the usual click-drag-unclick, the character is highlighted as the cursor crosses over it. But when I let go of the mouse button, the character un-highlights. This happens to me regularly in iWork Pages. It seems as if the position where the cursor is displayed is not quite where the software deems it to be. Has anyone else noticed this?

An even worse situation occurs in the macro editor in Open Office. Mind you it has always had a bit of a cursor offset issue. But now it's bad enough that there are some characters that are impossible to be selected individually. As you move the cursor over a character, nothing happens until you get well past it and hovering over the adjacent character, and then both of them are highlighted. If you back up then they both become deselected. The only way to select characters precisely is to use the shift key and the arrow keys.

Selection can get a bit finicky in any version of OS X or iOS (and particularly in iOS). There are technical reasons why this is happens, but the easy solution is to zoom in and then make the selection. With gestures that is really fast and easy to do.

Well, maybe. But I've never had this kind of quirkiness in any earlier version of OSX. Also, I've confirmed that there's no difference whether using the trackpad or the mouse.

Seems to me that the font metrics are screwed. I'm using Palatino for the Pages document in question. Maybe I should try a different font and see if the problem persists. The font that Open Office uses in the macro editor appears to be Courier, or more likely, their own version of it. But I don't use that often enough to get too worked up about it.

As for iOS, I don't even try to select portions of text. I have better ways to waste my time.