I love using the NEAR search operator and was hoping I could also use this on DTG on my iPad. After successfully syncing my database, searching for single words seems to work great without having to download the actual files. However, searches using NEAR don’t seem to work at all!
I started by trying a more advanced search airport NEAR parking, which should have 2 hits in my database, but nothing was found on the iPad. Then I thought, maybe the files needs to be downloaded and stored locally on the iPad to work? So I looked in a local document for two words which were near each-other and did that search relevant NEAR information, but that also did not produce any results! Lastly I tried that same search in the in-document search, which also gave no results. If I type just one of the two terms in the search box, it shows a big list of documents including the one I was looking for, but that kind of defeats the purpose of using NEAR.
Am I missing something or is something going wrong? I read that DTG 3.2 should have the NEAR operator functionality, so I’m not sure what I’m missing.
Works here on DTTG 3.3.3; are you using a prior version (there was a search bug in at least one prior version)? Otherwise you may need to reindex (in the main DTTG window, select ?, help, appendix, utility URL commands).
Thanx for the suggestions, and weirdly enough I was indeed on an older version (3.3.1) even though I had pressed “redownload app” only yesterday, so I assumed I was on the latest version.
3.3.3 seems to have fixed it for the main search bar, great! One thing that’s still not working is NEAR in the in-document search, or is that feature not available on DTG?
As you can see on the left side the database search now succesfully finds the file in 3.3.3, that’s great! But on the right side, the same exact search operation does not seem to give any results in the in-document search (Even though the thing I’m searching for is directly behind it, the first line on the page). Does this mean advanced operators don’t work for in-document search, or is this also a bug?
What I’m trying to do is what I use DEVONthink desktop for, and what I love it for: you search for a document using the NEAR operator, it finds some matches and then you can find where in the document that match occurs.
PSPDFKIT dues not support Boolean operators. Those are supported in database-searching, not in-document searching. And yes, there is a different behavior in DEVONthink on the Mac as the frameworks are not the same.
Thanks for the clarification. Sorry to hear it’s not currently possible, hopefully this can be added in the future since I think this feature is core to what makes DT on the Mac such an amazing program!
I guess for now the workflow on the iPad would have to be:
Search in DTG to find the document
Download that document and export it to another PDF reader app
Use that third party PDF app to do in-document boolean search to find the section you’re looking for.
By the way, thanks a lot for the quick answers everyone, I appreciate it!
The app “PDF Search” seems to be able to do something similar, although not as precisely as with the NEAR operator. If you’d type airport parking in the search field of that app, the page with those terms nearest to each other would rank highest. Since the DEVONthink boolean search already confirmed that document should contain airport NEAR parking, the #1 result in the PDF Search app should be the one you’re looking for.
I just tested out 2 apps though, perhaps there is one with actual boolean search
