ASK

Email Mac|Life at ask@maclife.com

Get official documentation at support.apple.com | Get help with hardware at support.apple.com/repair

PDF text not recognized by either Preview or Spotlight

I’ve downloaded a thesis, written in a mixture of Polish and English, in PDF which wasn’t scanned in as page images, so its contents should be fully accessible. Why can’t Preview or Spotlight find any useful text in it?

Surprisingly, although Unicode is a couple of years older than PDF, text in PDF documents isn’t normally encoded using Unicode characters, but using ancient codepages based on extended ASCII text. Most of the time this works just fine, but in some documents which have had more tortuous origins, it can block all access to the text content within them.

Usually, Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader, using its own proprietary engine rather than macOS to handle PDF, gives best access, but in this case it too falls apart if you try to export this document as text or in Word format. When Spotlight attempts to analyze the document content to let you