Fuzzy Search: how to find hyphenated word in a line break?

[Baetylus]

Hi All. Devonthink’s search feature has revolutionized the way I do research, but I find that sometimes it misses a few files with the exact word broken into two lines. For example: I want to search the word “Celtiberian”. With fuzzy search turned on I can find files with “Celtiberian”, “Keltiberian”, and even “Celt-iberian”, but not the following:

I can only find this by searching Celtiber*. Not anything else. The reason seems to be that Devonthink reads the text as “Celtiber ians”. Is there something I can do to fix this?

[chrillek]

This or similar questions have been asked before:

How can I search for exact hyphenated text?

The description of DEVONthink’s search operators (p. 223 in the DEVONthink manual) explains the handling of hyphenated expressions: Words separated by hyphens are handled like word1 word2 OR "word1 word2" I’m trying to find all documents where I’ve used a code block with language-applescript, and it’s returning false positives like documents containing text such as “blah blah blah languge, AppleScript, blah blah blah”. Is there any clever way to search for literal hyphenated expressions?

Question about search term involving a hyphen

I have a document with the title: digIT - Duty of Care Acknowledgement When I search for digIT - Duty I do not find the document although all three parts (digIT, - and Duty) are part of the title. I do find the document when I omit the hyphen (-); I also find the document when I search for the phrase “digIT - Duty”. Why’s that? Why do the three parts digIT - Duty not find the document?

Broken words at the end of the line

PDF-generating softwares put hyphens at the end of a line if word needs to be broken into two. The search algorithm in DT seems to consider these broken words as separate. Here, I have attached a sample page. sampe_page.pdf (28.8 KB) Download the file, import it to Devonthink and search for the word “possessives”. How many occurrences does DT recognize? It gives me none. But, if I search the same word in Acrobat Adobe, it gives me 1 occurrence, because Acrobat is intelligent enough to rem…

Do these threads leave open any more questions?

[Baetylus]

Thanks for the posts. The last one is my exact issue. So there is still no workaround a year later?

[Dellu]

No, they have no solution for this. Foxtrot has a way around it using Xpdf (FoxTrot Search Forum: FoxTrot Search User Forum » Broken words at the end of line). DT doesn’t.

[chrillek]

@Baetylus

So there is still no workaround a year later?

@cgrunenberg was very clear in that thread: DT relies on Apple’s PDFKit to search in PDFs. And that doesn’t find hyphenated text (as you can easily verify by opening your PDF in Preview and searching for “Celtiberians”). So, unless Apple fixes their framework, there’s probably nothing going to change here. And I wouldn’t hold my breath for Apple to get their act together.