Background
Some of you might get an exported PDF that's become non-searchable even though the original PDF is searchable in both GoodNotes and another PDF viewer (e.g. Preview, Chrome, Adobe Reader).
Solution
This occurs if the original PDF was encoded with certain PDF engines like Skia/PDF (used by Google Documents), LaTex (xdvipdfmx), iText. As GoodNotes currently uses Apple's native iPadOS engine to encode PDFs, unfortunately the app doesn't have much control here.
To work around this, you can:
- Convert the original PDF to a Word document using another tool, like Zamzar.com, and then convert that Word document to a new PDF using that same tool. The new PDF can be imported into GoodNotes without this issue.
- Convert the source document (e.g. Word document) to a new PDF using another tool, like above, and import that new PDF to GoodNotes. (*)
- Export the PDF document from GoodNotes for macOS (if you have a Mac).
(*) If the original PDF was created from a Google Document, you can redownload the document from within Google Document as a .docx (not a PDF), then convert that .docx document to a PDF with a tool like Zamzar.com.