PDF Markup that's findable and searchable by Spotlight

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Level 1

8 points

PDF Markup that's findable and searchable by Spotlight

I have a few hundred pages of hand-written notes that I've just scanned in as a PDF. Typing out the notes from scratch would be too much work, and I can't use OCR to convert them to text (too sloppy). So what I thought I'd do is use the Tools -> Annotate -> (Text or Notes) functionality of the Preview app with the idea that on each page I could type out a few keywords. My hope that was that, while still in Preview, I could type out words in the search bar in order to find where in the document the relevant material is. Likewise, I'd like to be able to use Spotlight to search across all of my documents to see where certain words can be found.

I've added some text and saved the document. However, I cannot find my newly typed out search terms either in Preview or with Spotlight.

Is there a way to do this in Preview. Would another app allow me to do this (ideally not Adobe Reader)?

Thank you!

iMac 21.5", macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 27, 2019 1:55 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

bits2mine Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 28, 2019 3:44 AM in response to leroydouglas

Thank you! With PDFexpert, I could enter text either as an Annotation, which Spotlight could not see, or just as Text, which Spotlight could see. I appreciate the answer!

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,272 points

Dec 27, 2019 3:26 PM in response to bits2mine

Preview and Spotlight are focused on the primary text content within a PDF, and not its annotations, which are another class of PDF content. I haven't tried this, but presumably, using a lower cost PDF editor would allow you to enter your "notes" at the original text layer, and after it is saved, then the PDF would be searchable by Preview or Spotlight.

Last year, as an experiment, I wrote a short Python script that interrogates an annotated PDF, and prints out each type of annotation, and the annotation text where relevant.

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Answer 3

Dec 27, 2019 2:17 PM in response to bits2mine

Would another app allow me to do this (ideally not Adobe Reader)?

You can always try any other true PDF editor, and test:

PDFpen

PDFexpert

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Answer 4

Dec 28, 2019 8:59 AM in response to bits2mine

bits2mine wrote:

Thank you! With PDFexpert, I could enter text either as an Annotation, which Spotlight could not see, or just as Text, which Spotlight could see. I appreciate the answer!

Good computing bits2mine ! Glad to hear this solved your problem.

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PDF Markup that's findable and searchable by Spotlight

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