PDF Files Unsearchable in Mac Finder and Preview

[jay.larsen]

The PDF drawing files that are generated from Fusion 360 on either the Mac or PC are not searchable within Preview or the Finder on the Mac. 

I have the latest version of Fusion. Using the default templates and fonts.

In Preview on the Mac the normal double click that normally selects a whole word only selects a character, hence the words are never found during a search.

In Acrobat on the Mac or Windows the word is recognized. In addition on Windows the files are searchable in Explorer.

Seems like something in the PDF from Fusion is malformed (characters not joined into words) and the Mac/Preview can not reconstruct the words where Adobe can. On Windows I believe the Adobe PDF indexing engine is used.

[YoavFriedlander]

I tested on my end and it does seem like a possible structural problem. I found this information regarding searchable PDF that might give us a hint of what is going wrong:

What is a searchable PDF?

A searchable PDF is the PDF file composed of 2 layers, image layer and text layer. There in the text layer saves the text content and users are allowed to search for or locate the keyword within the document. 

Why is PDF Not Searchable?

In most cases, the reason why a PDF is not searchable can be concluded as, the file is not originally generated from documents editors like Adobe, Microsoft Office, it is image-based, which means the text content is saved as bitmap font. These fonts cannot be recognized, therefore the PDF tool cannot do the matching to locate the keywords.

Hence, to make a PDF searchable, you need to make the PDF image text to be recognized, this is just OCR works for.

https://www.cisdem.com/resource/make-a-searchable-pdf-from-scanned-file-mac.html

[jay.larsen]

Thanks for the tip.

I have developed a workaround for now that involves rasterizing the Fusion PDF, running OCR, and then recomposing the new PDF with the original PDF and the newly created OCR'd text layer. Fortunately this is done in one step with a program called "ocrmypdf". I hooked this program up to a folder watcher which then runs this process on the newly saved PDFs from Fusion.

This my first time to report an issue with Fusion - I believe this fix should be easy for Autodesk, but I could be wrong. It is a critical fix for our workflow as we rely on the Mac Finder search many times a day and have folder watcher scripts that look inside our drawings for keywords and sort them into Quote Packages for particular vendors.

[YoavFriedlander]

YES ! I saw a lot of online chatter about doing that - smart workaround 🙂