Search for a word or phrase within illustrator documents

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
April 13, 2022
2 replies
14440 views

Hello,

I'm looking for a way to be able to search for a phrase within a folder full of .ai files. The phrase is typed out within one of the illustrator documents (not the file name). Both the regular finder search tool and Spotlight are no help as far as searching the text within illustrator files. Is there a plugin that anyone knows of? Or some other way?

Thanks,

Erin

This topic has been closed for replies.

Kurt Gold

Community Expert

That mainly depends on how you save your .ai files (PDF compatible, compressed or uncompressed) and how exactly you configure the Spotlight search.

A very good application that may almost find everything inside files is called "Alfred" (with the "in" command). It can do much more, but I can recommend it anyway.

Note that it may not be able to find things that are compressed or encrypted, of course.

E

Erin5FA3Author

Participant

They are PDF compatible and uncompressed. They are on a cloud based server however (if that makes a difference).

Thanks! I'll check out Alfred.

Kurt Gold

Community Expert

That almost certainly is a crucial info that you are talking about some cloud server in this case.

As an experiment, try it with the same files on a local drive.

John Mensinger

Community Expert

I instantly thought of the incredible deep search tool, Agent Ransack, but it's Windows-only. Some Mac alternatives mentioned, here, but I couldn't recommend one or the other.

https://formac.informer.com/agent-ransack

https://alternativeto.net/software/agent-ransack/?platform=mac