I run a small bookkeeping business, so I have to look through dozens of bank statements in PDF format every month. I view these PDF files in Preview, and I often have to search for dollar amounts. This used to work just fine, but now Preview doesn’t accurately search for dollar amounts anymore. For example, if I search for “5.00”, Preview will find any instance of “5” or “00” in the entire PDF file, which doesn’t help me narrow down the search results at all.
It sounds like you recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, which is when this search functionality broke. Preview now thinks of the decimal point as a delimiter for your search, meaning that Preview believes you are doing two completely separate searches: one for the number “5” and one for the number “00”.
Safari still searches PDF files correctly, even though Preview doesn’t.
Thankfully, this problem is limited only to Preview. Safari still searches PDF files properly, so simply view and search your PDF file in Safari instead. Plus, other third-party apps still search PDF files properly as well, such as Adobe Reader (free, get.adobe.com/reader/) and PDFPen ($60, smilesoftware.com), so you could try one of them as an alternative.
You can quickly open your PDF file in any of these other apps by dragging-and-dropping the PDF file onto the app’s icon. Or you can set one of these apps to be the default app for opening all PDF files in the future. To do this, select your PDF file in the Finder, choose File > Get Info, choose the app’s name in the Open With section, and then click the Change All button.
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purplemaizenjm
May 28, 2011 at 8:59am
I have a pdf, file labled for all the work I do in different folders, then I burn them onto a disk so if I need them I can go back to them in my file and they don't clutter my computer.
