It’s great that DT will index words in a PDF, but if a pdf document comes up as relevant in a “see also”, finding the text which might be relevant can be a real pain, especially since most of the .pdfs I have in my database are over 20 pages long. I have to open the pdf externally and do a search in preview or acrobat.
I realize that DT isn’t intended to be a full-fledged PDF application, but I argue that if it’s going to work with PDFs, users should be able to, well, work with PDFs. The ability to find and select text in a PDF seems a reasonable request for an application which incorporates PDF into its workflow.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. So does DEVONtechnologies, in response to my complaints about this in the past.
But until Apple releases more of their PDF "hooks" to developers, we’ll have to make do.
I will say that Apple has done a great job on Preview under OS X 10.3.x – so much so that I’ve made Preview my default application for opening, viewing and searching PDFs.
Absolutely. I use Acrobat to do things to pdfs (commenting, concatenating multiple pdfs, etc.) but it’s hard to beat Panther’s Preview for speed, features, and most of all–price.