Thank you all for responding. I think I’ve gone as far as I can, so here’s an update:

I had been using power-find  so I didn’t notice the “ignore diacritics” option. That, of course, worked just fine and solved that problem. So thanks to Hamid and Philip.

I don’t know what PDF Expert is, but it does seem that I have a file which cannot become searchable and there seems to be no way to convert it. I don’t have the full version of BBEdit and I’m guessing that Eric Richard is correct in that it is an older file from a Windows machine. I tried downloading Acrobat Reader via Parallels, but that didn’t work and I tried something I found on the Adobe site of making each page into a tiff file and then back into pdf, but that also didn’t work except that I could now copy individual words and phrases and paste them successfully.

So I guess I’ll just have to give up and find workarounds.

Thanks again.

Daniel