Generated PDF is not text searchable - RH10

[tanborj]

Hi,

I generated a PDF, then tried to find a Word but it always says "no matches were found." It shouldn't work that way, right? I would really appreciate your help as I badly need this Find feature.

Thanks!

[Anjaneai_Srivastava]

Hi,

Does your Project contains Double Byte Characters (Chinese/Japanese/Korean text)?

What version of reader/Acrobat are you using? Does it happen when you are using Advance Search?

Thanks,

Anjaneai

[tanborj]

Hi Anjaneai,

My project is all written in pure English.

I am using Adobe Reader X. I'm just trying to do a simple search (ctrl + F).

[Anjaneai_Srivastava]

Are you able to select the keyword being search on your PD document, or does the whole page gets selected. You can try going to Text Recognition option and choose, in this file to run OCR on the PDF.

See if this might be a case?

[tanborj]

When I do the search, no words are matching the keyword that I'm searching. I tried the OCR Text Recognition settings in Acrobat and the search works. But shouldn't RoboHelp have this setup ready when generating a PDF file? It's just incovenient for us users to double the effort (i.e. generate PDF from RH > then open the PDF file in Acrobat to set up the Text Recognition. What if the RH user doesn't have Acrobat to configure the Text Recognition feature? Just a thought . Also, I have hundreds of pages in the document and the process of setting up (I mean generating the PDF) the OCR recognition consumes much time).

Good to know though that there's a workaround for this through Acrobat but would be great if RH can do this alone

[Anjaneai_Srivastava]

This ideally, does not happen, that the text is not searchable, unless when you launch your generated PDF in a protected mode where most of the operations are not allowed.

I checked with another document and it looked perfectly fine and I was able to search things with OCR settings.

Have you enabled any Security Settings for your PDF? Can you take this PDF to a different machine and check there.

[tanborj]

I had somebody to check the PDF for me using his machine, and just the same search is not working.

Follow up question: why is the PDF Settings button disabled in the printed doc (see image below)?

[Anjaneai_Srivastava]

This means probably you do not have Adobe PDF creation add on installed on your machine. When you installed Robohelp, this componennt gets installed for PDF settings/PDF generation process.

You may check for this add on installation, try running Robohelp installation and you should see a checkbox for this add on to be installed.

[tanborj]

Tried installing the PDF add-on, but this message appears. So this means I already have the add-on installed, right?

[Anjaneai_Srivastava · Accepted solution]

I guess this would imply to the fact you have Acrobat/Reader installed.

I guess you do have one of these. try uninstalling that and then install it again.

[tanborj]

Finally, this solves the problem (search + PDF settings). I uninstalled Acrobat then reinstalled RH.

Thanks for your help, Anjaneia.