Search in DT Proprietary PDF Viewer

I’m new to DT(PO) and still trying to determine whether to purchase a license. I’m hoping DT can help me avoid buying a separate pdf reader like Abbyy or Adobe, but I can’t seem to figure out how to use three basic(ish) functions:

  1. Is there a way to use a Boolean search within DT’s proprietary pdf viewer? I can get it to work fine when searching my databases, but once I open the pdf in DT’s pdf viewer, it seems to restrict me to single word searches. (I can see the results within whatever the split pain that shows the pdf and the search results is called, but not once the pdf is opened on its own, if that makes sense.)

  2. Relatedly, is there a way to preserve the database search results so that they open when a pdf is opened in DT’s pdf viewer? I assume if Boolean search doesn’t work within DT’s proprietary pdf viewer, the answer is “no,” at least for Boolean searches over databases.

  3. Is there a way to restrict DT to use exact word matches? In some software this is done by using quotation marks, but this doesn’t seem to be how DT accomplishes this. E.g., a search for “mode” in DT with or without quotation marks returns searches for “model,” “modern,” etc., whereas the same search in preview with quotation marks returns only exact matches.

Thanks in advance for any help you’re willing to provide to a beginner in training.

  1. No. The Boolean operators are for our search field. It does not apply to the standard macOS Find functions.
  2. I don’t understand what you’re describing here, but I’d hazard to say, no it won’t.
  3. Our search already does this. In the search field, disable Prefix while typing in the search options (under the magnifying glass). This option assumes a wildcard at the end of the last term. (Note: This does not apply to Tools > Search. You need to apply wildcards to search terms there.)
    However, with PDFs, the search functions of PDFKit use search terms as substring matches.

Thanks for your quick reply. 3 clears things up perfectly. As for the other two questions, I suppose I wasn’t clear. Here is my use case to make my meaning a little more clear:

I am using DTPO to search for PDFs that contain a set of terms, like “Dog” OR “Cat,” in one of my databases. Doing so returns a set of results, ranked according to which PDFs contain the most instances of those terms. If I select one of those PDFs, without double clicking, I can run through the results in a split screen view, with the ranking of all PDFs that match my query on top and an abridged version of the PDF viewer on bottom (I’m sorry, I don’t know the correct term for what you call this view). And I can do this for any PDF in the ranked list. Now, when I double click to open one of those PDFs, say the one with the most hits, through DTPO’s PDF viewer (not Preview or some other external viewer), I want to run that same search, “Dog” OR “Cat,” so that I can go through just that one PDF in the full screen PDF viewer; so, just to be clear, this functionality is not something I can do through DTPO, but would instead require something like Adobe or ABBYY?

No, this is not possible. If you double-click the PDF to open it in its own window, you can only use the Find option (Command-F).