When I cut and paste a word form a pdf file into the search window I get wavy lines, why is this

Question

I am editing a document and wish to look up words and other information. When I select and copy a word from my pdf document and paste it into firefox's search window, I do not get the word but wavy lines instead. How can I remedy this? Example: I am trying to look up Carl Jung and copied this name but when I try pasting it I get this wavy line: ␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣

Answer 1

You’re omitting essential information here, namely how exactly do you paste into the message you’re composing in Mail when it crashes. Do you paste by ctrl-clicking (or right-clicking) and choosing Paste from the contextual menu maybe? Try doing Edit > Paste (⌘V) instead; I bet Mail won’t crash if you do that.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if you also have a plug-in or an input manager or a contextual menu item or something like that that has a bearing on this. In the Finder, go to each of the following folders (if they exist). What do you see there?
/Library/Contextual Menu Items/
/Library/InputManagers/
/Library/Mail/Bundles/
~/Library/Contextual Menu Items/
~/Library/InputManagers/
~/Library/Mail/Bundles/
To make accurately reporting this information easier, you may open /Applications/Utilities/Terminal, type the following command (you can just copy it here and paste it in Terminal), and press <Return>. You can then copy the output of that command from Terminal and paste it in your reply to this post:
ls -1 /Library/Contextual\ Menu\ Items/ /Library/InputManagers /Library/Mail/Bundles ~/Library/Contextual\ Menu\ Items/ ~/Library/InputManagers ~/Library/Mail/Bundles
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. You can easily locate any of the folders referred to in this post by copying the folder path here, doing Go > Go to Folder in the Finder, and pasting the folder path there.