EasyFind 5.0.2 not searching Contents of files in Tahoe

Miscellaneous
1

Seach for: Contents is greyed out in MacOS Tahoe. Help?

2

Most likely due to the other settings, therefore a screenshot would be useful.

3

I should have known - I trashed the .plist, all good now. DOH!

4

I just realized that I am having a similar issue. While the option to search Contents can be selected, EasyFind is not searching the contents of files. Maybe it’s only not searching inside PDF documents? As suggested above, I tried deleting the .plist file with no change. I then used AppCleaner to remove EasyFind, re-downloaded and re-installed, no change. I changed the security setting to disallow full disk access and then re-allowed full disk access with no change. The program indicates that it has processed the number of files in the folders that it is searching, but doesn’t even find things that Find in the Finder can find.

5

EasyFind supports only text-based formats, not binary ones. Therefore depending on the encoding of PDF documents it might or might not work.

6

Thanks for that info. Is there any easy way to tell the encoding? Finder searches can, to the extent that Finder searches work at all, find content in these PDF files. Searching inside the PDF files for the text also works. Often, these are invoices, etc. that I have saved as a PDF. I swore that this used to work, but I could be mistaken. I’m just used to EasyFind working better than Finder searches which, Finder searches ARE finding text in PDFs whereas EasyFind doesn’t.

Thanks again for any suggestions … truly appreciated.

7

Yes if the PDFs have a text layer often created by OCR, then EasyFind probably will work.

8

These are generally PDFs generated by “printing” an invoice from a web browser or downloading a PDF invoice from a vendor. None of these are generated via OCR. They are internally searchable if opened by Acrobat or Preview.

Thanks for your input, it’s truly appreciated.

9

If the browser or the vender does not provide that text layer then there is no text to search. Use DEVONthink to add the text layer to PDFs not having it.

10

Does not the fact that the PDF is Preview and Finder searchable indicate that the text layer is there? The text is also editable in Acrobat which, I would have presumed, suggests that the text layer is present.

Thanks for your input, it is truly appreciated.

11

Both Preview and Finder (or actually Spotlight) fully support PDF documents, EasyFind doesn’t. It’s intended for text-based file formats (like source code, shell scripts, Markdown, HTML/XML etc.). Therefore even if a PDF has a text layer it might or might not work.

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12

Understood … it may just be my faulty recollections (yeah, right!) that suggested to me that it used to work. From your replies, I believe that EasyFind is working as it always has and I’m just making the rest of the stuff up! :joy:

Again, thanks to everyone who has responded to this thread. I believe that this is the last and final answer. All input was valuable to my troubleshooting and greatly appreciated.

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