Search For A Word In A Text On Mac OS X

If youre looking to convert a PDF into DOC, DOCX, RTF, or TXT format, well cover a few options to get the extraction job done in Mac OS X.

This is basically the opposite scenario of converting a Word doc to PDF via Microsoft Office Word app, but its just as frequently necessary.

Next, well show you a paid solution from Adobe which is a thorough and complex PDF to DOC converter tool that is best used for professional applications, and an alternative native Mac app which offers similar functionality.

Finally, well cover a more automated method that is an extension of the first text extraction approach, which can convert PDF to text files that you can edit, which is perhaps most appropriate for casual uses and with simple PDF files.

You can then open the DOCX file in Microsoft Office, or with the Apple Pages app to verify the conversion went smoothly.

Plus you can convert the file into anything you want, whether its doc, docx, rtf, or even a pdf.

You can then save the file as a DOC or DOCX file when finished in Pages, Microsoft Office, or your app of choice.

The Adobe offering is a web app and therefore works in Mac OS X, iOS, Windows, or Linux, and can convert the PDF file into a DOC, DOCX, RTF, or even Excel XLSX files.

That doesnt sound too great for many users, which is why the next option may be more appearing to many Mac users looking to perform PDF file conversions.

Search For A Word In A Text On Free Trial Versions

These are never particularly cheap solutions, but fortunately many of them include free trial versions so that you can do a test run to determine if they will work for your needs.

Well discuss one of these options called CISDEM PDF Converter OCR, but there are many others out there.

This is far superior many of the other PDF conversion tools out there, and with fairly simple PDF documents the output is nearly perfect.

It also has the benefit of not requiring internet access or a web browser, since the app is native on the Mac.

Compared to the copy and paste methods, or the Automator methods, its worlds better, but you really will want to test it out with a trial document or two before committing to the app yourself.

Automator is considered a bit more advanced as it basically creates an automated macro for the task youre setting up, but its not particularly complicated if you follow the setup instructions.

Remember, the simpler the PDF the better this method will work, complex PDF files or PDF files of images will not work as the text is not recognized (as there is no OCR going on here, its simply text extraction).

This is why you must either extract the contents of the PDF manually, then import those into the file format of your choice, or use the conversion tools available.

For example, heres what happens when you try to load a PDF File into a text editor of Mac OS X, none of the PDF text is visible without a conversion or copypaste or extraction effort, its all gibberish displayed.

Select the Advanced Search.

What word or phrase would you like to search for box, type a word from the document.

Pick any word in the document, just to get the process going.

Click Search. d. a Scanned Page Alert box will tell you that the page only contains a scanned image, and asks if you want to run a character analysis.

Click OK e. a Recognize Text box will allow an option to select which pages are scanned.

Click OK. f. if the text you have selected is fuzzy, you might not get the results you need in which case you could try a different word for scanning.

If it is readable by the scanning process, the document text will be available for selection.

Save the document in this format (preferably under a different file name, to avoid contaminating the original).

Option 2 in the OSX Daily article.

How To Search For A Word In A Text On Mac