Working with text selection in UWP PDF Viewer (SfPdfViewer)

19 Dec 20222 minutes to read

The PDF Viewer supports text selection and copy feature, which allows user to select the text in the PDF document and copy it to the clipboard. This section illustrates about how to use this feature.

Property	Action
IsTextSelectionEnabled	Gets or sets the value that enables or disables the text selection feature in the PDF Viewer. This property when set to true enables text selection and vice versa. By default, this property is set to true.

XAML

<syncfusion:SfPdfViewerControl x:Name="pdfViewerControl" IsTextSelectionEnabled="False"/>

C#

//Text selection feature in the PDF Viewer is disabled.
pdfViewerControl.IsTextSelectionEnabled = false;

How to select text?

Follow below steps to select text in the PDF file.

Using touch gestures

1) Tap over the texts in the page, the tapped word will be selected and two bubbles will be displayed on each end. Similarly text can be selected by long pressing a particular word as well.

2) Tap and drag the left bubble to select the text at the left and top, and the right bubble to select the text at the right and bottom directions.

Using mouse

1) The mouse pointer will be changed to the text selection pointer when pointed over the text region.

2) Place the mouse pointer on the text area and click the mouse left button and drag the mouse pointer over the text to select the text in any direction.

3) To select a particular word, you can double click on it.

How to modify the selection color?

The color used for text selection and the color of the handle can be customized. The property SelectionColor in the TextSelectionSettings class of PdfViewerControl can be used to customize them. The below code snippet illustrates the same.

C#

//Customizing the color being displayed while selecting the text from PDF document.
pdfViewerControl.TextSelectionSettings.SelectionColor = global::Windows.UI.Color.FromArgb(150, 150, 207, 226);

How to enable/disable copy button in text selection?

We can enable/disable the visibility of the copy button while performing text selection. The below code example illustrates the same.

C#

//Disables the copy button during text selection
pdfViewerControl.TextSelectionMenu.CopyButton.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed;

By default, the visibility of the copy button is Visible.

How to get the selected text?

When the text selection action is completed, the TextSelectionCompleted event will be raised. The event arguments will contain the selected text.

C#

PdfViewer.TextSelectionCompleted += PdfViewer_TextSelectionCompleted;

private void PdfViewer_TextSelectionCompleted(object sender, TextSelectionCompletedEventArgs e)
{
    //Get the selected text
    string selectedText = e.SelectedText;
}