I want to use Apple’s new Live Text feature to search a PDF for a specific text phrase. The PDF is a large file without any baked-in encoded text. Just many pages of images of scanned text, stored in a PDF.
Per this question, Preview evidently cannot use Live Text in a PDF directly:
Force Preview to Live Text a PDF?
Using File > Export, I can turn the PDF into a multi-page PNG image file.
Once it’s an image, Live Text is immediately available. I can select and copy/paste OCR’d text out of the image. I can press ⌘A to select all the text on a single page.
But how can I search the image file for Live Text?
In the image file, Preview’s Edit > Find... is not available.
I can copy/paste a single page’s Live Text, and then use Find in a text editor. But I can’t copy more than one page of the image at a time.
Can I use Find or use Spotlight Search to search Live Text? Please only answers using the new iOS/macOS Live Text feature, not any 3rd party OCR programs.