I have this document http://www.pharmakologie.uni-mainz.de/FolienMediziner/Dietrich/Stimulantien.pdf (PW: mainz05) and was looking for Bupropion in Spotlight. Spotlight found the word in the linked document and displayed it as a result, but running a “find word in document” in DTP to find the substance produced no results although it is on page 5.
This hasn’t been the first time that this happens and makes the “find” function a little too dodgy for my needs.
I also noticed that the Safari-like highlighting of searches in a document doesn’t always work, am I missing something?
Apple’s Cocoa rich text has a convention that may seem strange. Text in a hyperlink string isn’t considered text. When DT uses a Cocoa text routine to index a rich text document into the Concordance, which is used for searching, terms within hyperlink strings are not indexed.
But Apple plays a bit fast and loose with its own conventions. So the Find operation can see a term inside a hyperlink string, as can Spotlight. Perhaps the inconsistencies in identifying what’s text and what’s not in rich text will be eliminated in the future.
As to highlighting query terms in display of search results, you will find variance by file type.