I have both googled and looked in the forums for this prior to registering and posting this question, and here goes:
I have decided to try out Scrivener, and am running Windows 7 at work, and Mac privately. I tested the Scrivener software initially at home on a Mac, and especially the search function impressed me, since I could drag and drop .pdf’s into a project, and when searching - Scrivener searched within the .pdf’s.
Today I installed Scrivener at work, and added .pdf’s to a project (I want to organize some of my study material) - but when I search for content I know is searchable in the .pdf’s - nothing happens.
Is this a bug or a feature when running Scrivener on Windows?
Please advise - I would really, really like to be able to search within the documents I drag into my Scrivener project.
Unfortunately searching in PDFs isn’t possible at the moment. I think this is due to the PDF tools Scrivener uses, but I’ve filed this as a bug in case there is something Lee’s able to do to get around it, since obviously the ability to search PDFs would be ideal.
What you could try in the meantime, although it will take a little more work, is to use keywords or document notes to tag your imported PDFs so that you can search on them for those particular terms–it won’t help the case of searching within the PDF itself, but it may help you be able to quickly find the relevant PDF when using project search, and with document notes you can also jot page numbers next to terms to help you navigate there quickly when you’re looking for something. Not quite as free-form as a standard search, but on the upside it may help you with your own organization, the way that summarizing a text can help solidify the key points for you. (At least, I often find that helpful–mileage may vary and all that.)