Thank you for contacting Clarivate Analytics Technical Support.
I could certainly understand your situation and I apologize for the trouble you are experiencing.
I am sorry to inform you that we have an ongoing issue with EndNote X8 that searching within the PDF crashes EndNote. We have already reported this to our developers and they are diligently working on it to resolve this issue. Therefore, I am going to forward your comments to our developers in addition to the existing issue. However, I am sorry that I am unable to provide you the exact time frame when this will be resolved. I shall definitely get back to you if I receive any updates from them.
In the mean time, you can try opening the PDF in any third party PDF Viewer application as a workaround.
There will be an update released in the next few weeks which will include a fix for this issue (searching via the X8 Windows PDF search bar results in the X8 app freezing). I’ll update this thread when I have confirmation of the X8.0.1 release date.
The EndNote X8.0.1 for Windows was released on March 14th, 2017, and included a fix for this PDF search bar issue. To install, under the EndNote “Help” menu, choose “Check for Updates…” and the update will begin automatically.
I am running EndNote X8.0.1 build 10444 and cannot search within a pdf file using Cntrl-f. Is the fix that this has been disabled or is the fix supposed to fix this?
The keyboard shorcut does not work but if you have the update you should be able to use the search box in the upper right once you have a pdf file open to search the text of the pdf file.