Find Not Working in Preview

Most PDFs are scanned paper documents stored as an image rather than text format.

Searchable PDFs need an additional text layer beneath the 'image'.

But these require additional steps to create which is why there aren't that much of them.

http://www.alliancegroup.co.uk/pdf-searchable-images.htm

PDFPen is one application to create searchable PDFs.

Stefan

It seems that the search function in Preview has stopped working. Priorly, the app used to work fine in all the text based PDF documents. The only change that I have done recently is installing sierra on the mac. Any suggestions? Thank you!

I admit that I haven't really given much or any thoughts about the PDFs I have to be searchable or not.

I simply haven't cared about it.

Essentially it is up to the creator of the PDF whether they make the additional step/work to get their PDF searchable or not.

Plus given the possibilty to allow or forbid certain user-actions when creating a PDF it may be that they can be a reason too.

Stefan

I have the same problem. I can search a PDF document, and Preview will find some occurances of the word, and not others. I tried copy-paste of an occurance that it did not find, and it copy-pastes fine, unlike in your case. I also did not do any "safe as" on the document, it is the original as downloaded from the internet.

Do you have any updated info on this?

I still have this problem. One moment I can find a word, the next it is not working, and I have no idea what the problem is.

I was having the same problem - with no search results coming up. Then I clicked on the button in the top left corner (below the red X) and selected Table of Contents, and oddly enough search results started popping up. Weird, I know, but that's what happened. I'm not sure what would happen if there was no table of contents. This file was a textbook that I downloaded. Hope this helps!

This is a very frustrating problem, and it's sad to see it has persisted so long.

My experience was very similar: downloaded a pdf; was able to highlight and copy and paste text, no problem; but when i tried to search, this is what i saw [screenshot]:

Maddening!

But, after finding and reading this thread, i retraced my steps, and found that it was indeed related to a Mac OS X "Save as" glitch — sort of.

Whenever i download a document i intend to work on directly, adding annotations and highlights, etc., i sometimes choose to work on a copy, leaving another untouched (i'm an obsessive academic); sure enough: Preview was not finding text in the *copy* i had made (by clicking "duplicate" in the contextual menu after selecting the pdf in Finder). The original document was perfectly fine; only the duplicate copy is corrupted.

What's interesting though is that when i tried to highlight text in the original, Preview (of course) told me it is "locked" and asked if i wanted to unlock it or work on a copy; i clicked copy, and voila: the duplicate version created by Preview actually seems to work fine.

So long story short: i guess i can't trust Finder to duplicate pdf documents for me; from now on i'll do it through Preview.

BTW: Being paranoid, i checked and double-checked. So far so good. (Which is to say: not great, really, because we shouldn't be having this problem in the first place... sigh.) Anyway, good luck, i hope maybe this helps someone.

I started having a similar problem with an all-text PDF document. I use this document very often and I typically use the search a lot. Well, searches just stopped working in *this* file. Other files are OK. Anything I searched, no occurrences found.

I noticed there was a greyed "Locked" legend next to the file name in the Preview window. I checked the Lock flag in the Info window and also looked for the padlock icon, and no, they were not there.

I added a Speech Bubble annotation and then it changed to "Edited". I removed the bubble, and Voilá! searches are back. Happy again 🙂

Preview - goodreader - copy/paste - search: Not working

I have a very similar problem with preview where I can't copy/ paste and search documents. It has occurred with most documents that I saved in a dropbox folder and opened/ edited with goodreader on my iPad....

I access most of my academic stuff as well as work related stuff with goodreader on the go.

It must be something the way goodreader or dropbox saves the files, I guess. But I'm no techy and just can't get my files working again.

Thankful for all suggestions

Cheers

I have a similar problem. the pdf I downloaded was searchable and I have permissions to edit it so it isn't locked. Regardless, once I highlighted some of the text, the search function of Preview quit working.

What I need is to be able to search in the highlighted text pdf 😟

Does someone have some answers?

Thanks!!

Having found that my searches were suddenly yielding 'no results' I found this page and the suggestion that using 'save' was the cause of the problem, I reloaded the file from the web and indeed searching worked again with the new download. As I precaution I locked the file so it cannot accidentally be changed to a non-searchable version. I guess I should also make a second version so I can make annotations and save them, while keeping the original locked version for searches.

Robeman up above seems to have suggested a fix for when searching does go wrong. I'll check that out some time to see if it works when I'm not actively working on the file!

Try this:

1. File
2. Revert To
3. Click an older version

Fixed mine.

I have the same problem. ZERO search results. Adobe Acrobat Professional searches just fine (same document), but Preview shows nothing at all "No Results Found"

OSX 10.11.3

Preview 8.1

see this above.. I had scanned an ocr doc and preview search would only search for first letter and highlite

that letter in the doc when I typed in second letter it said it was on page one of one page doc I then saw brose's post and tried it and when I toggled between one option and table of contents it WORKED for a whole word. Still not working as it should but you can search for a word with this one quick step

brose131Nov 30, 2012 10:30 PM Re: Find Not Working in Preview
in response to Tools&Keys

I was having the same problem - with no search results coming up. Then I clicked on the button in the top left corner (below the red X) and selected Table of Contents, and oddly enough search results started popping up. Weird, I know, but that's what happened. I'm not sure what would happen if there was no table of contents. This file was a textbook that I downloaded. Hope this helps!