Big Sur 11.3, Spotlight and RTF files

Everything related to our flagship word processor.
Post Reply
B.Otter
Posts: 27
Joined: 2021-02-06 15:24:00

Big Sur 11.3, Spotlight and RTF files

Post by B.Otter »

Previously, Spotlight under Big Sur would not find results when searching CONTENTS of RTF files for me. And others have also reported this problem. So, I had defaulted my save file type in Nisus to RTFD, which Spotlight would result.

Now, under Big Sur 11.3, Spotlight appears to be working normally again and will successfully search the contents of both RTF and RTFD files.

One caveat. It may have only been a matter of time for Spotlight indexing, but, I did not turn up results for the contents of RTF files until I dragged my User folder to the Privacy tab of Spotlight, exited System Preferences, then returned to Spotlight and deleted my User folder from the Privacy tab. This forces Spotlight to build a new index for whatever folder had been added, then removed, from the Privacy tab.

Finally, though YMMV.

Best,
Brad
User avatar
martin
Official Nisus Person
Posts: 5227
Joined: 2002-07-11 17:14:10
Location: San Diego, CA
Contact:

Re: Big Sur 11.3, Spotlight and RTF files

Post by martin »

Thank you for the update Brad! It's nice to know that Apple finally fixed this regression in Spotlight indexing.

And thanks for the tip on how to force Spotlight to reindex documents and files. It looks like Apple goes over the same steps in this support page on how to rebuild your Spotlight search index. There are also various ways to this via the command line (eg: Terminal) but they involve elevated privileges (sudo/etc).
Bob Stern
Posts: 170
Joined: 2006-03-12 12:32:47

Re: Big Sur 11.3, Spotlight and RTF files

Post by Bob Stern »

Although Big Sur 11.3 fixes this bug, I don’t think the bug has been fixed for Catalina 10.15.7.

A possible fix for Catalina users could be to install in /Library/Spotlight/ a non-buggy copy of RichText.mdimporter, either from Mojave or Big Sur. Would that work in parallel with the buggy version in /System/Library/, or would the version in the system library folder supersede the one in the root library folder, i.e., cause the latter to be ignored?
Post Reply