"No Matches Were Found" when words clearly in Document

[Kelly5FCE]

Hi There,

I use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC for work and use the find function to scan documents for key words in order to improve efficiency. I run the program on Windows 10.

Recently, the find function has been useless, stating "Adobe Acrobat has finished searching the document. No matches were found". This is despite me being able to see the words I am searching for within the document. This has happened once before but seemed to rectify itself with a simply close and restart - however I haven't been so lucky this time. I've noticed Adobe doesn't even try to convert the document in order to read it (usually a loading pop-up window would appear with something along the lines of "conducting image to text conversion"). I can manually put it in edit mode where this box will briefly appear, but then I can only search for words by clicking on each individual text box - this defeats the point in my use of  the tool.

I've looked at previous topics on this issue where it is recommend to "Purge Cache Contents", however this still has not fixed my problem. I cannot find a way of resetting preferences further as I'm not an administrator of my machine.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated so that I can combat this problem and work more efficiently.

Thanks in advance.
Kelly

[Document Geek]

I ran into something similar ahile back. Check your font encoding. And read this: Custom PDF Font Encoding: Why You Should Care and What You Can Do About It

[Karl Heinz Kremer · Accepted solution]

Kelly, does this happen with all documents, or just a few that are all from the same source? 

The first thing I would do is to mark a paragraph that contains what you are searching for, then copy it and paste it into e.g. MS Word. Is the text the same as what you started out with? Can you search in Word and find the term? 

If the text is not the same, you are dealing with a font encoding issue. If the text is the same, and you can search in Word - or if this happens with all PDF files, I would try to repair the Acrobat installation, or re-install it. If a plain repair/reinstall does not work, then I would "clean" my system from any traces of Acrobat using Adobe's Cleaner application: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/acrobatcleaner.html

[Kelly5FCE]

Hi Karl,

It seemed to be this particular set of documents (accounts published by the same business) but then the issue translated onto previously working documents until the tool just wasn't working whatsoever.

Thanks to your advice, I've ran the cleaner and I've also researched this particular set of documents by pasting into Word. There is a font encoding issue with this set of documents, but the cleaner has sorted out whatever the glitch was that stopped it working on previously "clean" documents. 

Thanks again for your help!
Kelly 

[EmpiricalAU]

I also have this issue, and while the below explains it, it doesn't really solve it in the general sence when you didn't author the document,  particularly if we are working with Reader only. When you are looking over many large documents, which may or may not be relevant (can't tell from the title), and where most geuninely are not relevant, and with a time limit, a simple message of  "no matches were found" is decieving.

It would be really helpful in these events if Reader would detect and provide a warning that "Custom or Identity_H encoded fonts detected. Search results may not be accurate." or similar as a heads up not to rely on the search result in the case of "no matches found".