Search help for precise phrase

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NisusUser
Posts: 317
Joined: 2011-01-12 05:32:38

Search help for precise phrase

Post by NisusUser »

This issue is not unique to NWP, but it seems I often want to refer to NWP's help which is in PDF form, and I run into a problem.

How can I search in Preview (or any other popular PDF reader) for a precise phrase or for a phrase and a certain word? E.g., I wanted to know if NWP has special treatment for ligatures since one font I was using kept inserting them. I searched for "open type font". Preview finds anything that has any of those words. How can I make it search for all of those words or for "open type" and "font"?

Without being able to search for a whole phrase or string, one gets way too many hits to be useful without a lot of time wasted.

Thanks!

P.S. I did find that by using Cmd-T to get the fonts panel and then selecting the Gear icon and Typography, I could shut off ligatures. But the NWP help didn't help me find that.
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adryan
Posts: 561
Joined: 2014-02-08 12:57:03
Location: Australia

Re: Search help for precise phrase

Post by adryan »

G’day, NisusUser et al

If you enclose the whole of a search term in quotation marks, most search engines treat the expression as a single whole. Preview appears to respect this syntax.

If you had searched for “ligature”, you would have got a lot of hits, including one towards the bottom referring you to the entry in the Index for “Remove Ligature Attribute”. Perhaps this is what you were looking for.

Cheers,
Adrian
Last edited by adryan on 2015-09-04 04:13:18, edited 1 time in total.
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Þorvarður
Posts: 410
Joined: 2012-12-19 05:02:52

Re: Search help for precise phrase

Post by Þorvarður »

To find a phrase in Preview, use quotations marks.
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1.png (36.25 KiB) Viewed 5604 times
In Skim make sure that neither "Whole Words Only" nor "Ignore Case" is enabled. Quotations marks are not required in Skim.
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2.png (50.71 KiB) Viewed 5604 times
By the way, the string "open type" doesn't seem to appear in NWP's Help.
NisusUser
Posts: 317
Joined: 2011-01-12 05:32:38

Re: Search help for precise phrase

Post by NisusUser »

Þorvarður wrote: By the way, the string "open type" doesn't seem to appear in NWP's Help.
I tried the quotation marks with "open type" and didn't get anywhere, then being not-so-creative, I decided that it just couldn't find it – not realizing that it really was not there! So it's all my fault. Seems like I've seen this before.

I do like Skim's defaults for this better, but for some reason I stopped using Skim – I don't recall why, – maybe just because Preview worked. :)

Thanks for helping me out of my mental block!
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