Find function not working in 2024!

[Sue34691714ys0y]

Find function completely useless in Acrobat Pro which I updated to thinking that it was a problem with free Acrobat Reader. Downloaded latest version of Acrobat Pro so I doubt it is a patch problem. I am using Acrobat Pro Version 2023.008.20423 on an Apple M2. Neither Control F nor selecting Find Text or Tools makes any difference. I type in the word that appears at least 20 times in a 200 page document and it says it can't find it anywhere. Super frustrating.

[Sue34691714ys0y · Accepted solution]

Answering my own question here in case others run into the same thing. Under the Tools menu, under Recognize Text, click on "in this file" and it does an OCR scan that makes the text searchable rather than simply an image. Thank you Adobe support.

[DrPattyL]

This did not fix my issue. I have used this feature hundreds of times and now it cannot find ANYTHING.  I'm literally looking at the text and Adobe Acrobat Pro cannot find an exact match. 

[Randall37813739bueg]

Had this problem in March 2024 and it's still there in June.  Is someone asleep at the switch at Adobe?

[Randall37813739bueg]

After a Chat session with Adobe Support, and trying multiple workarounds - none worked - the final consensus was the Search function was not compatible with digital files (PDFs) that were scans of previously scanned files.  That's confusing because some PDF files have been created via scanning, and Search functions normally.  

In the meantime, my workaround is to open the 'problem' PDF using MS Word, edit, search, etc. as wanted, then save it as a PDF.  That newly-saved PDF will then open in Adobe, MS Edge, Google, etc.

A caveat: I haven't yet tried saving the Word-created PDFs that have graphics images or different formatting - e.g. columns.  So if you opt to do this, be sure to check your results before deleting the original PDF.

[netalia_7941]

Was there ever a solution for this? None of the solutions work. Most documents are not created using PDF but are scanned so I'm unclear as to why the Find text option is not working.