Preview on Catalina fails to select or copy text in PDF

ICYI:

As it turns out, there is apparently an issue in Apple's Preview app. I took this issue up with another representative at AppleCare. Fortunately, this chap was not an arrogant idiot as the first one was.

I finally got some feedback on my case today. Here's a brief synopsis:

I received feedback from our engineers. They confirmed that there is an issue with the Preview feature in Catalina. They were able to reproduce the issue by testing it on Macs running both Mojave and Catalina and got the same result that you did. This is something that has been reported and will be addressed in a future software update.

Giving the Apply guy the benefit of the doubt, there's likely a gap between what he meant and what he said and what was understood. Otherwise he's an idiot.

I can copy and paste text from PDFs that I have in Catalina; and Apple does indeed provide methods to select and copy text from PDFs in their frameworks for developers -- the same frameworks on which Preview is built.

PDFs can be curious creatures, in that they are essentially code that has to be interpreted. The same page can be coded in many different ways, and some types of coding might be 'misunderstood' by the rendering engine. It's possible that the PDF-generating tool your bank uses may be writing the data out in a way that MacOS doesn't like. (Windows-based, commercial frameworks designed to auto-generate PDFs from database output are not without issue.)

At this point, it's impossible to know who is obeying the standard and where the bug is. (I can accept that you're unwilling to provide example PDFs of your bank statements for scrutiny!) Though clearly, something has changed between Mojave and Catalina.

However, there have been issues of this sort several times throughout MacOS's history, and the usual fix is to 'rinse' the PDF through Apple's PDFKit by re-saving the PDF from Preview. You can try adding a harmless annotation somewhere to force a save.

When saving a PDF, MacOS has to rewrite the PDF using its own data structures, and the revised PDF can then sometimes be understood by Preview more easily.

If that doesn't work, it's always worth having a second PDF viewing app that doesn't use MacOS's PDFKit, just to get a second opinion on a PDF. As you have found out, you can use Chrome or FireFox to copy from the PDF. Acrobat Reader is of course the gold standard; there's also Foxit Reader.