search in preview not working in macos mojave

Hundreds of people report they also have this issue..

Apple - Any chance we'll see this fixed, ever?

Thanks! I re-opened the PDF in order for search to work. But I also noticed that sometimes you have to go to the upper left corner which says "Sort by" then press -> "Table of Contents" in order to make the search function to work.

I found that changing one choice in preview preferences and quit (to force updating the preference file) made everything work again as expected when re-opening the file. After that, the choice in preferences can be reverted back.

Nothing's working for me ... but, if you read through this entire post, you'll find something new and interesting!

I'm using High Sierra 10.13.6. Preview version 10.0 (944.5). Files that I (probably) used to be able to search before are (no longer) searchable. I tried Cmd-W, closing and reopening Preview, change a Preference and restarting Preview, deleting ALL com.apple.preview.plist files. Nothing works.

I can search some files fine, but not others with Preview. Here's something further interesting ... the files I CAN search with Preview I can also search with Adobe Acrobat DC. The files that don't work in Preview don't work with Acrobat either! And the same is true of Safari and Google Chrome using File>Open File ...

AND, using Preview and Safari "Export as PDF ..." doesn't work either! Files still remain unsearchable.

However, I was able (with some errors) to use ABBYY's FineReader to "convert" an unsearchable PDF to a searchable PDF file.

A very very strange bug. There certainly appears to be something wrong with the unsearchable files.

I think I found out what it is ... apparently these unsearchable files are not in fact PDF files, but are IMAGES! I installed a free trial of Adobe's Acrobat Pro DC, which I do NOT want to pay for. But I opened an unsearchable file, and it said, "This page contains only an image. Would you like to run text recognition to make the text on this page accessible?" I converted the file to "Editable text and images". VOILA! The resulting file is searchable, even in Preview!

Now the mystery is ... "why and when did my previously searchable .PDF files become image files?"

Does anybody have an easier way to convert such files back into true PDFs?

I've been working with many PDFs this last week and I've found the same thing: 100% of the time, a PDF has to be opened that second time before it can be searched. But search has been 100% successful on that second opening. Quite an unusual bug.

beowulflee- thanks!

I recently upgraded to Mojave and just discovered this same issue... thought the PDF had somehow become corrupted. Closing the PDF and reopening fixed it. Oh, Apple... 😝

Just replying here to say that I had the same problem and it was driving me crazy. Command-W and reopening the file fixed it for me.

I'm in high sierra. It appears that pdf's downloaded since high sierra are not searchable, even after open/close/open. Please repeat any work arounds that I may have missed.

Correction. Sort by table of contents DOES solve the problem! Thanks!

I have this issue too with Mojave. Sometimes when I open a PDF, search function does not work at all. I close the PDF then re-open it, then suddenly search will work. Ridiculous and annoying.

If I close and reopen one file in Preview, then other open files also become searchable!

(2015 iMac, Mojave 14.1)

this is ********. fix it apple!