Is it possible to search within PDFs?

Is it possible to search within PDFs? Using Edit/Find/Find… (i.e. Cmd-F) on an open rich or plain text document or a web page results in the regular OS X search operating within the document. When I try this with an open PDF the menu item is greyed out. Am I missing something?

You have to open the PDF in Preview to search.

Double-clicking on the document name should do that – at least the way DT is configured on my Mac.

That’s what I’ve been doing. So it’s not possible to do it from within Devonthink? Surely it would be easy to implement the UI in the same way as one searches within rich and plain text, and the functionality to search within PDFs comes for free with OS X (fancy DT concordances notwithstaning). Consider this a +1 for searching for PDFs within DT :wink:

We agee with you. The functionality to search within PDF + text documents and display results should be easy! But it’s not; Apple hasn’t yet released for developers hooks to do this for their proprietary Preview application code. So it would be a big programming job to provide that functionality in DEVONthink under the Panther OS.

Tiger (OS X 10.4) will provide developers access to Apple’s PDFKit. Look for improved PDF searching and display in future versions of DEVONthink, running under 10.4. :slight_smile:

Hehe. It’s easy for non-developers like me to assume that everything Apple applications does is included in the price of admission as soon as you develop in Cocoa. I guess not :wink:. Here’s looking forward to 10.4 and an updated DT!

By the way, will 10.3 be supported in post-10.4 releases of Devonthink, or is it expected to take advantage of things like PDFKit and Core Data, which would presumably make 10.3 support not worth the effort?

Have the developers tried to ask around for that functionality? Usually the Apple Tech guys and/or many people on the OmniDev-Lists are quite helpful - at least that has been my experience back in the DP4-days…