Poppler/Poppler-glib 0.78.0-1 breaks text selecting in evince and epdfview.
I initially wrote it off as a evince bug but upon further digging it affects other poppler based pdf readers including epdfview in the same way.
I am Using arch Linux with the 5.2 kernel and i3-wm and was able to reproduce the issue with and without Compton.
eventually stumbled upon poppler being the culprit when laptop broke after doing the update to poppler 0.78.0-1
I am currently installing gnome to see if it is affected in the same way.
It is worth noting that its a visual bug and text is still copied to clipboard fine.