Does Index do file names only?

If I index a folder from my hard drive, will DT3 Index give me search results based only on file names, or will it give me results also based on the content of the files?

I’m experimenting with it now, and it appears to find only those search strings contained in filenames. Search strings inside files don’t seem to show up.

Am I doing something wrong?

Indexing will index the contents of compatible files, e.g., PDFs, rich text files, Pages, etc.

A screencap of the search could be helpful, including what you’re expecting to find.

Well, this is weird, then. My Index database is full of PDFs that have been OCR-ed. If I search in Spotlight for a word that occurs in a document but not a title, it finds the document.

If I go into a .pdf in my Index database in DT3 and highlight something, I can copy it. So I know the OCR has worked even inside DT3.

But when I enter a search string in the DT3 Toolbar search window, I get nothing except documents whose titles have the word I’m searching for. I get no documents that have the search-word only in the text.

However, if I select one of the documents in my Index database that I know has the search-string in it, and enter the search-string in the Inspector’s search field - which searches just the document - it finds it.

Any idea why this is happening? Should I delete it and start over?

One more piece of information: the Index database that isn’t working properly is quite large: it represents thousands of documents on my hard drive in hundreds of folders.

So I just tested creating a new index in a different database, of just one small folder from my hard drive. It worked fine. So I may just trash the previous Index database and create a new one. Maybe in smaller increments rather than one huge chunk.

You could try a File > Rebuild Database to rebuild the index.

Thanks. I just trashed it and did it over. It worked.

Next question: how often do I need to “Update Indexed Items”? Does it do any updating automatically, like Spotlight?

The index is automatically updated since version 3. But especially in case of indexed network volumes updating the index manually might be required sometimes.

Got it. Thank you, as always, for your help.