Q: Spotlight not searching in pdf content
Hello everyone,
I have a lot of pdf files with typical useless names coming from taxes, banks, ... I need to search some specific words in their content in order to classify and rename them. However, what ever is my OS X version (I have different macs) Spotlight is completely unable to do a search in my pdf files, whatever is their origin or content, and even though I add the search specification "content". Any other program can (but it is not the goal to have different SW for a job that should natively be done). So, what should I do with my pdf files or with Spotlight settings in order to enable spotlight to do its job?
Thanks!
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
Posted on Jan 14, 2016 8:43 AM
First - make sure the PDFs you are trying to search have readable content by opening them up in Preview and searching for some text that should be in there. This confirms there is content to search.
Second - check the Spotlight settings in System Preferences has PDF selected, so that it is indexing PDFs
If these two are correct you should be able to search PDF content
Posted on Jun 6, 2016 11:17 PM