Can't search RTFD files?

If you open TextEdit and add some random text to it and then add one picture it will convert the document from RTF to RTFD because now it has an image.

As soon as it’s an RTFD file spotlight can never find the contents inside of it. Before the image was added and was just a plain RTF document spotlight could find things for days. But that one little image makes it forget everything.

I get that RTFD is actually a folder but inside that folder is a text file that should be searchable if you ask me but it’s not.

I can’t be the only one in the world affected by this? And I don’t understand why it’s even an issue.

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RTFD file are special kinds of folders; they are packages. As I understand it, a package is a folder with an indicator/flag, letting the operating system know that the files within the package/folder are supposed to stay together.

Searching online for more information about this, it looks like there are others who have had this issue. There are some hacks out there, but … the hacks I’ve come across are from years ago, and I don’t know that it would work the same way on the current operating system. And, even the people giving the hacks describe them as “ugly.”

I’m trying to think what I would do if I were you in this situation. Maybe there are better workarounds or solutions. Can you provide more details?

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Thanks! I’ve solved the issue and went with using HTML instead of RTFD since MacOS can read those fine.

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Thanks. Another workaround is to save a text file with the rtfd file, same name and same file date. I couldn’t figure out how to save as html out of Text Edit. That seems like a cool solution, but I only know how to do it in Word or a wysiwyg web editor.