MeldUI

Plugin: Selection

Text selection on the page and copy-to-clipboard.

The Selection plugin enables text selection on PDF pages and provides the underlying selection state used by the highlight tool.

Enabling flag

The Selection plugin is always registered — useSelection is always available. features.selection controls whether the SelectionLayer (drag-to-select on the page) is rendered. It’s also effectively required by features.annotations, since highlights need to know what text was selected.

What it does

  • Native text selection via drag — the engine reconstructs text runs from PDFium and lets the user select across them
  • Ctrl/Cmd + C copies the selected text to clipboard
  • Selection state is consumed by the annotation plugin to create highlights from a drag-selected region
  • Selection persists across scroll until cleared

Composable

useSelection(documentId) from @embedpdf/plugin-selection/vue. Returns reactive selection state including the selected text and bounding rectangles per page.

Events

onEndSelection callback — fires when a selection completes. DocumentViewer uses this to capture selectedText on newly-created highlights.

Dependencies

  • viewport
  • interaction-manager (always registered)

Configuration

No featureConfig.

When you’d touch it directly

To build a custom “copy as quote” action that includes the page number alongside the selected text:

import { useSelectionCapability } from '@embedpdf/plugin-selection/vue'

const cap = useSelectionCapability()
cap.provides.value?.onEndSelection((text, pageRanges) => {
  copyToClipboard(`"${text}" — page ${pageRanges[0].pageIndex + 1}`)
})

See also

Introduction