3rd party PDF file not searchable

Band7

I need a searchable version of this PDF document. It's not my file so I cannot change the source document.

None of the suggested solutions I found on Google will work for me as I don't have any of the subscriptions which seem to be needed. Can anyone help please?

oldernonethewiser

Clumsy way to do it but you can save the page as a pdf which then becomes searchable.

flaneurs_lobster

You can open the file in the free Adobe Acrobat reader and search it there (or have I missed some requirement?).

debitcardmayhem

Open it with Word , it should convert it ....It did for me

Band7

oldernonethewiser said:

Clumsy way to do it but you can save the page as a pdf which then becomes searchable.

Tried that, still won't let me search. I tried in Chrome, Edge and native Acrobat Reader. 

debitcardmayhem said:

Open it with Word , it should convert it ....It did for me

I don't have Word....uploaded it to Google Drive instead and tried with GoogleDocs. No joy.

flaneurs_lobster said:

You can open the file in the free Adobe Acrobat reader and search it there (or have I missed some requirement?).

Nope, it finds nothing.


I have in the meantime found an HTML version of the document. It's in a readable format and I can search it, so problem solved for now. Thanks all for your suggestions.

Neil_Jones

Well I just opened it in Adobe Reader and I can search in it so I don't know what you're doing...

DullGreyGuy

Is searchable without doing anything just using Safari 

facade

How odd, I can highlight text so it isn't a picture, but not find anything in a search.

The reason seems to be if I paste what I copy it is full of random spaces

e.g. from page 1

What appears onscreen as Baroness Nevill -Rolfe

copies and pastes into notepad as

B ar o n e s s N e vill e -R olf e

There is talk that these documents are created with something called TeX, or OCR'd with something called LaTeX.

EDIT:

Hah!

If I copy the word and then paste it into the search box, I can find more instances of it- as you would expect.

e.g. I copy "employment"

And paste into the search box, it appears as "e m pl o y m e nt r" (why the extra r?)

And I can find more instances.

If I delete the nasty r from the search box  the highlight only extends over "employmen"

outtatune

It looks like whoever created the pdf did not follow proper accessibility guidelines. It's not a properly searchable pdf, peoples browsers and pdf viewers are having to do optical character recognition to select text and search.

That's inexcusable for a public facing government document.