Search within PDFs

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. :cry:

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.