I have a DevonDatabase with 1475 pdf documents. When I search for the word car I get hits on other words like carbon, carol, cards etc.
This is a pretty basic question but is there a setting somewhere or some way of matching only the whole word car ?
Guess the issue is that the highlighted string in the PDF document is just the letters c a r and it does not have to be the car the word.
Somewhere in the PDF document the word car has to be present for the match to be made. So the search itself works correctly.
My problem is when I look at the PDF document.
When you look at the PDF document, anywhere the string car occurs, it is highlighted.
cards, cart, carrot, bicarbonate.
Is there a setting that makes only the isolated car be highlighted when you review the PDF?
I said somewhere in the PDF car has to exist as a separate word for the search to find that PDF. But actually, this does not seem to be the case.
I was looking for the word radio in a recent search. I have many documents (PDFs) dealing with radiology and they all get found. So I guess I still do not get how to restrict the search to just the word radio
This is controlled by the search functions in PDFKit. It treats all terms as substring matches. Notice the same phenomenon in Preview (which obviously uses Apple’s PDFKit)…
But a future release will definitely work around this shortcoming of PDFkit.
Enclosing the search term in quotes helps in DEVONthink although it is not perfect in my experience. But in Preview, searching for “paper”, avoids the hits on paperless but still hits paper in my experience.
When I use this in DEVONthink, it makes the search much more specific to the whole word but I still get some “false positives”. But, in my limited experience, it is useful.
