Preview not searching PDFs under macOS Mojave?

dunning · September 29, 2018

Wondering if anyone else is having this problem: if I open a PDF from my Zotero library in Preview, it will not show results for any terms. It will work fine if I either open it in Acrobat Reader or move the PDF file out of the Zotero library to another location.

dstillman · October 1, 2018

Are you saying that, if you just double-click on a PDF in Zotero to open it in Preview and then search for a term in the Preview search box in the top right, nothing appears? That works fine for me.

What happens if you use Show File and then open the PDF in Preview directly?

Is your Zotero data directory at /Users/:user/Zotero?

dunning · October 1, 2018

Thanks for confirming that it's not widespread – something in the combination of updating Zotero, rebuilding the Spotlight index, and restarting seems to have fixed it.