Altium Nexus 2.012: generating better searchable PDFs?

[dtgriscom]

I'm managing a project where the schematic capture is being done using Altium Nexus 2.012. In the past, I've been given schematics generated by Mentor Graphics, and have been able to search the PDFs for symbol names using macOS Preview, which has been incredibly valuable in doing reviews. With these Altium schematics, however, almost none of the symbol names can be found using the normal PDF search. I'll search for, say, "PG5V3", and will only have one hit on a page where I can see four such signals. Using Adobe Acrobat yields more hits, but also lots of spurious matches, so that's not a great solution.

Are there any settings or tricks my schematic guy could be using to make this better?

 

[andre_luis]

I'm unfamiliar with Altium Nexus, the only I have used is Altium Designer, which has the Smart PDF Wizard tool (File»Smart PDF) with which you can setup PDF output to let either Nets and Designators 'browseable' through their Id's at the PDF document.

 

[dtgriscom]

Thanks for the response. I looked at the Altium Designer Smart PDF Wizard, and its configuration just specifies what is to be included, and how the results should be organized; there isn't anything like a "Make the PDF More Searchable" checkbox.

After trying a half dozen PDF viewers for the Mac, I've found that some do better than Preview at searching these, and others don't, with no real rhyme and reason. My best guess is that the standard macOS preview isn't highly-tolerant of somewhat eccentric PDFs, and Altium Nexus generates PDFs that look and print fine, but are internally somewhat eccentric, which makes them harder for PDF readers to search them.

For now I'm switching to Acrobat Reader, which seems to search the PDFs well, although it has some other eccentricities. Such is life...


Thanks again,
Dan