how to search on a PDF for words or phrases

[Carol Blanchard]

Hello! I am a new user of Mac Forums and have OSX 10.8.5 on a macmini 2.5 GHz IntelCore 15 I would like to index a book now on a PDF, but PDFs don't allow the search and find operation. That's all I need for getting the references to the keyword(s), as the publisher will do the actual insertion. What program available can I use for this?

 

[ron4mac]

The Preview app (standard on your Mac) does a pretty good job of find text in a PDF. But the PDF needs to be really made up of text components and not scanned images. The way to tell if text in a PDF is real text or just a scanned image is to try to select some of the text by clicking and dragging your mouse over the text. Real text will highlight as expected ... an image will likely cause the whole page to be selected. If what you are working with is just images, you'll have to use optical character recognition (OCR) to turn the images into text. The best option would be to try to get a real text version of the book. Otherwise you need an application (like PDFpen) to turn it to text.

 

[IWT]

+1 for PDFpen (and PDFpen Pro). Some would say pricey, but videos & tutorials are very helpful and these are robust apps.

 

[Carol Blanchard]

The Preview app (standard on your Mac) does a pretty good job of find text in a PDF. But the PDF needs to be really made up of text components and not scanned images. The way to tell if text in a PDF is real text or just a scanned image is to try to select some of the text by clicking and dragging your mouse over the text. Real text will highlight as expected ... an image will likely cause the whole page to be selected. If what you are working with is just images, you'll have to use optical character recognition (OCR) to turn the images into text. The best option would be to try to get a real text version of the book. Otherwise you need an application (like PDFpen) to turn it to text.

Dear ron4mac: Thanks for this. At the moment I can't check on it---but when I do, I will get back about it.

Carol

 

[Carol Blanchard]

how to search a PDF for words and phrases

Dear Ron,

Well of course! I didn't even look on the Adobe Reader menu bar, and I found the way in very easily. Just what we wanted. However, making an index is a big job…there may be better ways.

Thanks again.

Carol