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I need to search for texts in several PDF at the same time. Preview does the job: I select the files in the Finder and open them together in Preview. Then, searching for some text happens simultaneously in all the PDF: great! But is very unstable. When searching, it often crashes.

Is there an alternative to Preview with the same feature?

My system is 10.11.6 and Preview is 8.1

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  • Evernote Premium and DevonTHINK apps can search in PDF files, but they all are not free. – Denis Rasulev Dec 27 '16 at 17:02
  • Yes good idea @pjctech – Colas Dec 27 '16 at 18:40
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Use Spotlight.

Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's macOS and iOS operating systems. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates an index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications, and System Preferences. In addition, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched. It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other attributes.

With Spotlight you can do advanced searches and filter for example on file extensions like .pdf.

Finder Spotlight

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