Searching words with diacritic or non-english letters in Preview

I need to search for words with diacritic marks (like ü, ö) or non-english letters (like ç, ş, ğ) in Preview. I was able to do this without a problem on my old macbook, but it does not work on the M2 with Ventura 13.3. It appears to be able to find the characters, as it says under the search bar, e.g., "found on 32 pages" and it shows these pages on the Sidebar, however on the Sidebar it shows on the listed pages "pa... not found" and when I click them and it brings me to the pages, there is indeed nothing found, nothing highlighted. Any ideas how to resolve the issue? Thanks.

MacBook Air (M2, 2022)

Posted on Feb 13, 2024 8:47 PM

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1 reply

Feb 14, 2024 3:33 AM in response to RobbMcA

I can confirm that in Ventura 13.6.4 that cmd+F searches in Preview ignore words with diacriticals (e.g. ö, ü, etc), only to show a Not Found result. I recommend that you send a feedback bug report directly to the macOS product team who do not participate in these communities, but do learn about product issues through that feedback link.


This is not a limitation in Preview on macOS Sonoma 14.3.1, or the free current Adobe Acrobat Reader (Ventura or Sonoma) when searching (cmd+F) for a whole or portion of a word containing these characters. For the uninitiated, one can press and hold the character to receive a diacritical and choose from the floating palette of accents within the search dialog.


I recommend that you send a feedback bug report directly to the macOS product team who do not participate in these communities, but do learn about product issues through that feedback link.


As an aside, I have a Python program on Ventura 13.6.4 that uses Apple's PDFKit framework to successfully find words containing diacriticals in the same PDF where Preview fails, even though Preview uses the same PDFKit framework.

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Searching words with diacritic or non-english letters in Preview

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