Does Spotlight search look in pdf annotations?

[nicka]

Actually, what I am asking is whether Spotlight search is supposed to look in annotations. I haven't had success searching on terms that I know are in annotations that I have made in pdfs that are attached to Bookends references.

The annotations I was trying to search for are the kind that Preview makes if you highlight some text, then right-click on the highlight and select 'Add Note'.

Basically I'm trying to get to this kind of workflow: " Folks want to be able to store all their journal articles together in a single program, make notes on them as they would on paper copies, and search both their articles and their notes easily." http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/h ... otate-pdfs

[Jon]

I don't know (and the answer may be OS version-dependent). Why not test yourself, using the Finder's Spotlight function?

Jon
Sonny Software

[nicka]

I checked that, and the answer is that on both my Macs (on 10.8) the Finder Spotlight search also isn't finding words in annotations. But Spotlight seems to be a bit unreliable, hence the question about whether it is supposed to be finding them.

Any thoughts about the pdf workflow (Jon or anyone)? It seems such a basic thing to do: search in both pdfs and their annotations. It'd be great if Bookends could do this at some point in the future, but I can see that it would a nightmare to implement if Spotlight doesn't support it.

In the meantime, does anyone have experience of using Devonthink or similar software along with Bookends to do this?

[AsafKeller]

I use Skim for annotating PDF, and select the option to automatically create a Skim notes file for each PDF; these notes files are searchable by Spotlight (see http://bit.ly/1aUMXGi).

[nicka]

Thanks for this. I used to use Skim but if I am remembering right, its notes don't show up in Bookends on Tap, and that's why I went back to Preview.