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thewindow

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 10, 2009
13
0
Hey guys, this may sound dumb but, it just now started happening. When I search for certain words, it won't find any. When I type in a letter, it searches for the wrong letter or symbol. For example, if I type in "A" it searches for "C" and when I search for "C"it searches for "N". What's wrong?
 
Anyone? It's still happening and it sucks that I can't find stuff in this 300 page PDF file :(
 
If the PDF is of scanned material, it could be that the PDF creator tried to use an OCR to recognize the text and thus the actual text being seen by Preview is different than what you see (perhaps because of poor scan quality).
Try to copy the part of the text which is being erroneously found and paste it elsewhere. If the pasted text is exactly what you copied than the problem would be something else, but if, instead, random characters are pasted, then that's the problem, and unfortunately there's nothing you can do about it as it really wouldn't be Preview's fault.
 
Yeah that's the problem. It pastes random symbols. There's no way to fix it? It was fine a week ago when I was studying then, but just recently started doing that.
 
It's weird that you say that it used to work well up to a week ago (Perhaps only parts of it are OCRed incorrectly?). I don't believe there's anything you can do .. You can try to open it in Adobe Reader but I'd expect the same thing to happen.
 
Hey guys, I'm having a similar problem since I upgraded to El Capitan. My Preview search function just doesn't work anymore. The problem is obviously not the PDF as I know I've been searching these exact same PDF's hundreds of times before. 80% of the time it doesn't detect the word, the other 20% of the time it detects some occurrences.

It's really weird.. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Luke
 
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