Spotlight can't search rtf documents in Big Sur

I'm having the problem (documented here) where Big Sur can't search the contents of rtf documents. Just updated to 11.2, and still no love. Has anyone found a workaround?

Posted on Feb 3, 2021 12:53 PM

Similar questions

Spotlight Search no longer catalogs .RTF files as of Big Sur 11.0 and 11.0. What can I do? I use Text Edit a lot and have many important documents I created in Text Edit saved in .RTF format. As of the release of Big Sur, a Spotlight word search absolutely cannot find .RTF files containing my search word or phrase. Strangely, Spotlight works perfectly to find .RTFD files containing the search word or phrase! This is a huge problem for me, forcing me to save files as RTFD or Word docs so that they will be cataloged by Spotlight and searchable. Any idea how to fix this? I've already submitted a bug report to Apple.
426 6
Big Sur. Finder search does not recognise rtf files When I search in Finder for text within documents I get no hits for RTF files even though I know some of the contains the word searched for. Anyone else with similar problems? And a fix maybe? I have tried to let the Spotlight index rebuild. But that didn't help. Still no hit in rtf files. I'm on a MacBook Pro M1 with Big Sur. rtf files were created with Nisus Writer Pro. Regards Anders
884 5
Google Drive indexing and Spotlight search in Big Sur Hi there, That Spotlight isn't indexing the files on Google Drive in Monterey is a well know problem, and therefore I sticked to Big Sur, with which it was working. It looks, however, that it stopped working under Big Sur, too, since couple of days. Anyone can confirm? Has a final solution been found eventually?
2883 9

1 reply

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,422 points

Feb 3, 2021 1:36 PM in response to theolog

This remains a bug-fix candidate for Apple, as the Spotlight RichText importer continues to not find RTF content strings.

One could use programmatically get all RTF files in a folder tree, and then systematically open and search their content for the intended string. Matching files would go into an Array, and then these could be displayed in a Finder window when the application is finished. The other way to omit using Spotlight.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Spotlight can't search rtf documents in Big Sur

Welcome to Apple Support Community

A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.

Learn more Sign up