ctrl+f not working

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I had a similar situation.  But Acrobat would not crash, it just took a long time doing something as soon as you typed the first letter in the search box.  So if I did <ctrl-f> and typed immediately "sound" in the seach box only "s" would display.  If I started click around a "(not responding)" would be added to the right of the application title in the top edge to the Acrobat app.  Then the screen would get dimmed indicating the program was not responding to MY INPUT.  It was doing something and just waiting about 1 to 2 full minutes the program would respond by diplaying the remaining letters of the search word "sound" and all was good.  I could search any other word or phrase during this seasion.  If I closed the document and program the behavior returned.

This happend with "Adobe Acrobat DC Pro" or "Adobe Reader DC" latest Windows versions as od October 2021.

The solution mentioned here worked wor me also.  Simply go to <Preferences> and select the <Search> section.  Then uncheck the "Enable fast find" option and click "Purge cache content" a couple of times for good measure!  Exit the program and reopen any file and if works as it always had for over a decade!  What is the problem with Tech Support at Adobe not finding this issue and fixing it.  They ALWAYS go through the long search for "other reasons" outside their software.  This is a bug as it trys to search and cache the very second you start typing in the search box.  Maybe it is indexing stuff.  But I tried even one-page documents from many different sources.  I also have English with US Keyboard and Spanish with US International Keyboard installed.  But NONE of that matters.  It works or fails the same in documents downloaded form insurance carriers that are protected, in documents after being signed on DocuSign and on simple files or 150 page files.

The propblem IS the code they have for this feature called "Enable fast find".  It needs to be seriously debugged and tested with every combination of setups, languages, accented or not and all platforms as this same problem happens on recent versions of macOS (High Sierra, Catalina and Big Sur) as I have them all.

Bottom line - DON'T USE "ENABLE FAST FIND"

What kind of document are you searching. What language? You need to figure out if it is the document, the installed version of Acrobat or the combination that is the problem. Do you have access to another device where you could try to search, if it works on another device then we can look at your install and see where it is the problem. If the document is not searchable on other computers then the problem may be with the document. If you can search otehr PDF files then that too would mean that the answer is in the document itself. If you are trying to search a scanned document then the problem may be that the dialog to invoce OCR is corrupt. If there are fonts that are incorrectly encoded that may be another area that needs to be looked into.  If you press Ctrl-D (assuming you are on windows) then you get file properties. Would be interesting to know the creator (application) from the first tab, and to know what fonts are used/included from the third tab.

Hi,

What is the version of Acrobat Pro that you're using? And operating system?

Is this happening with every document you tyr to open or one file in particular?

Have you noticed if this started happening after an update?

Have you try repairing the installation?