Does it have to be in Preview? Preview doesn't seem to have this functionality as of El Capitan (10.11). However, I have found and tested two ways that you can search PDF files for punctuation.
- Acrobat Reader
pdfgrep
Acrobat Reader
Using Adobe Acrobat, I simply entered the punctuation into the search field in this case a colon (:) and Acrobat found all instances of it.
Note: I did successfully test out the question mark (?) and it worked. Unfortunately, the only document I had at the ready had personal info on it so I couldn't use it as an example. However, I made sure to test different punctuation from periods, exclamation points, question marks, commas, etc. and all worked.
pdfgrep
pdfgrep is the PDF equivalent to the command line (CLI) utility grep
. The useage is simple:
pdfgrep [OPTIONS] PATTERN FILE
So, to search for a comma, and have it tell you what page number it occurs on, simply issue the command:
pdfgrep -n "?" foobar.pdf
pdfgrep
is FOSS software and available on Homebrew and MacPorts. See man pdfgrep
for more info.
Preview is not actually opening the document for formatting/editing.
It opens a image of it, so no you can not change the font size, but you can increase the size of the image it self.
Best Answer
I've not found a way to get Preview to search for characters like
#
or+
, but Skim, an alternative PDF viewer (homepage here), is a good replacement/addition to Preview and is able to search more specifically.I've tested it and found it was able to find
C++
(without needing any quotes/special options) without bringing up allC
results.It was also able to search specifically for accented characters (like
é
orö
) — though requires such characters to be accented in the search to find them (i.e. you can't search forblah
and expect it to matchbläh
, nor vice versa). In Preview, either search will return matches for both accented and unaccented characters.