Acrobat Reader DC: Strange behaviour when searching for left or right paren

Oct 19, 2018
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In Acrobat Reader DC 2019.008.20074, under Windows 10, when I search for ")" (left paren), it finds the next occurrence and highiights it, but it also places a blue rectangle around a larger area of the text (containing the left paren). When I move the mouse pointer into the rectangle, it changes to a magnify cursor, and clicking it causes the page to be magnified. Outside of the blue box, the cursor behaves normally.
PDF%20search%20lparen%20capture.PNG

When I search for ")" (right paren), it finds the next occurrence, but it highlights any text immediately before and after the ), that's not separated by a space.e.g. for text "What?),", it will highlight the whole thing (including the trailing comma). For text "(Viva Italia!)" it highlights "Italia!)".
 
As I understand it, the blue box area displays the text section where you are most likely missing, in this case, a closing ")" parenthesis.

I.e., you have nested parentheses and either a left or right parenthesis is missing.

Box should help you identify where the missing should be by narrowing down the text section/paragraph in which to look.

Do some experiments with a paragraph using nested parentheses. Then remove various parentheses or add in an extra one some where.

You should be able to see how the box is working and helping.
 
Oct 19, 2018
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Thanks for providing some explanation of what's going on However, I've looked at the text very closely and I can see no unmatched parens within the box. If there are any, they must be deeper into the document. Is there a way to switch off this unhelpful facility?
 
Had to go back and look for my original source reference which I could not find again. However, I do agree that the paren mismatch that I thought was being identified is not there. My error and my apologies.

However, I did find some other information.

What you are encountering seems to be a known problem that was supposed to have been fixed in your version.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2364345

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2548694

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2344340

https://forums.adobe.com/docs/DOC-8572

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/viewing-pdfs-viewing-preferences.html

This link may also be of interest:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2461640

Not seeing a specific fix per se - however the objective for the moment is to ensure that we can correctly identify the problem using terms that do indeed lead to a fix.

And hopefully just a configuration option.
 
Oct 19, 2018
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Thanks for clarifying that. The links provide some useful background. That explains why this behaviour stops when the sidebar is hidden (allowing the visible document to be wider and the font to be larger). And there's a similar behaviour for other hard-to-see characters such as ' (single quote). But hiding the sidebar is not a good workaround, as the moment you click to add a comment, the sidebar reappears and so does the blue box. Clicking in the box magnifies that section, which is potentially useful, but when clicking on Next to find the next occurrence, the magnification remains, so only a small part of the text is visible, losing context. There's another possibly related odd behaviour that searching for an ordinary character such as 'a' will highlight not just the next occurrence but two adjacent words if it's in both of them e.g. in "Good lady, take his advice", searching for "a" highlights "lady, take".
 
Not sure what to suggest beyond contacting Acrobat.

They may have some satisfactory fix or work around that just has not gotten out yet.

Or they are just willing to leave customers to deal with the issue.

As mentioned in the link there was a fix with respect to your version. The fix may have addressed some part of the overall problem but not all of it.

At least you are a step or two ahead with being able to recognize and understand the problem.