Hello,
I'm Andy Green from Datalogics, Inc., the acg@datalogics.com referenced above. M. Degeorges is a Support customer of ours for the Adobe PDF Library, and came to us regarding this Acrobat issue. While we are able to reproduce the problem as he describes it via any version of Acrobat, even as recent as v11 Beta, we are PDF Library Support rather than Acrobat, and do not have any access to the inner workings of Acrobat, so we initially referred his case to Adobe Acrobat Support, along with the sample document that he has also provided here now.
The initial problem is as described above: Acrobat seems unable to locate any accented word via its own text search utilities, even though the word appears to reside in the document as an unbroken string of expected ASCII values.
As an example, look at the word "étude" in the problem sample. If I search for "tude," Acrobat will find and highlight the entire word. If I search for "étude" instead (keyboarding the "é" via Alt+0233), it cannot locate it.
A check with Preflight shows no PDF syntax problems with the sample, and a Browse of Internal PDF structure (via the Options menu in Preflight) shows "étude" listed as one five-byte string, with the accented letter rendered as <E9>, the expected 233 value in hex.
It's not clear to us why "étude" should not be findable. Unfortunately, Acrobat Support's initial suggestion to "uninstall the software and try to install it in French and then try to search for the words" does not seem to explain why a default US installation can't find a common accented letter, and our followup questions (including whether they are able to see the same problem that we do) were met with a boilerplate text request for us to phone them. Unfortunately M. Degeorges is in France, which makes phone contact with Adobe difficult, and our attempts resulted in some telephone tag, interspersed with recorded announcements of a 36-45 minute wait time, so we suggested to M. Degeorges that he try here instead.
I hope that clarifies the issue. I'll follow this thread in case I can answer any other questions.
Regards,
Andy