Help- trouble searching any words in PDFs!

Question

hi all,
i have been having  trouble searching any words in PDFs:
when i downloaded a PDF in my windows XP, it opened and searched fine at first with Adobe Reader. Then i zipped to to my iMac OS X, and when opening it in Preview, it would not find any text that i searched for. I re-downloaded it straight from the internet to my mac, several times, and each time still Preview could not search it.
Then i tried downloading and installing the entire Adobe Reader to my mac, so i could open it with that. But, then it still would not search/find anything in the PDF.
Then, I downloaded yet another PDF reader called Skim, installed and tried that on my MAC. Still, no luck. I went back to the original site where i got this PDF, and found the most updated version, deleted the former and redownloaded the latest to both my windows and my mac.  Finally this time it worked! So happy! Unfortunately, just today, a day or two later, i opened a different PDF on my mac, and it opened automatically using Adobe reader, (rather than the usual default Preview app, as i guess i might have set my prefs to change adobe reader to be the default while i was tinkering around trying to troubleshoot it all), and again i could not get the search to work at all! Then, i changed my mac prefs to have the default PDF opener be Preview. But still,Preview would not find any text in this pdf EITHER!
Can anyone please help? I have been going crazy trying to chase after the solution to this perplexing problem! thanks!
BTW,  i use Firefox (always the latest version) as my browser. And the PDFs i am discussing are downloaded already and opened from my OS (not the internet.)

Answer 1

public void checkWord() {
         String word1="1stWord";
         String word2="2ndWord";
         String word3="3rdWord";
         boolean w1,w2,w3;
         w1=false;
         w2=false;
         w3=false;
         ArrayList list=new ArrayList();
         list.add("1stWord");
         list.add("2ndWord");
         list.add("3rdWord");
         list.add("4thWord");
         Iterator i=list.iterator();
         while(i.hasNext()) {
                   String listValue=(String)i.next();
                   if(listValue.equals(word1)) w1=true;
                   else if(listValue.equals(word2)) w2=true;
                   else if(listValue.equals(word3)) w3=true;
         if(w1&&w2&&w3) {
                   System.out.println("All Matched");
}Will it work?