Hi again Daniel

Daniel Siegel wrote:
> Erik Richard Wrote:
>> Which application are you using for reading the PDF files - Preview or
>> AcrobatReader?
>
> I’m using Acrobat Pro DC. It does seem that the particular file I was
> trying to search is in picture mode and using the feature that’s
> supposed to turn it into text doesn’t make any difference. But I did
> expand my search and found other Hebrew pdfs that I could search even
> when pointed.

If you use the tool to convert a picture based PDF text file into "open" 
(= searchable) text, this should work /IF/ the picture in the PDF has 
not been locked and anchored.

If the converted PDF picture still isn't searchable, I'm, afraid that - 
here the Hebrew text - is in a locked unsearchable format. This could be 
because the PDF has been made either with an older Windows version of 
Acrobat Pro, which automatically will lock the picture parts to a 
non-searchable file.

> I have in the past successfully converted pdfs from picture to readable
> text and I don’t know why these won’t respond. I guess I’ll have to work
> around this issue.

When so - these converted pictures have been in an socalled 'open' 
format which is fully convertable and searchable.

Do you happen to have BareBones BBEdit with the TXT/PDF plug-in (is 
included in the full BBEdit version)? - If you have, you can open the 
PDF file in BBEdit and either in the header or footer of the opened file 
see which picture format has been used in your specific PDF file. NB. 
Using BareBones TextWrangler can't show this since TW isn't compatible 
with the TXT/PDF plug-in.

It has been too many years since I've worked with these problems, so I 
don't remember which picture formats can be opened as text and which 
not. - Way back in the deepest part of my 'internal RAM' [= brain.:-)] 
something still keeps telling me that if it is originated as a "PCX" (a 
Windows graphics format) file, made by an OCR-B application, you will 
not be able to make it to a seachable text.

> It still seems to me that Nisus is also resistant to searching a pointed
> text without pointing the search word. I just tested that again to be
> sure. Something to live with.

OK, here I'm out... - Since my retirement I haven't been working with 
such kinds of files. - Now I mostly use NWP for daily work and for 
making some - rather heavy - tables. In these - sometimes +100 pgs. 
table I've come across a similar problem not being able to search for 
specific words, - not even using the enhanced search tools in NWP will 
highlight a searched word in these tables...

Cheers, Erik Richard

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Erik Richard Sørensen <[log in to unmask]>
NisusWriter - The Future In Multilingual Text Processing - www.nisus.com
Openoffice.org - The Modern Productivity Solution - www.openoffice.org
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