Thanks for your response Bill.

You can find a minimal example here, with the org file, and the tex and pdf files generated from it. Firts try to search within the pdf. It does not work (at least on my side) To solve the problem, remove the line with 
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

in the tex file, and compile it. It should now search normally.

Martin 


> Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2015 12:24:31 -0400
> From: wtd@pobox.com
> To: mart_00@hotmail.com
> CC: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: [O] fontenc makes pdf non-searchable
> 
> On 21 March 2015, Martin Leduc wrote:
> 
> > I'm using org-mode to write a paper and export it to a pdf. It compiles just fine.
> >
> > However, when opening the experted pdf (with evince or okular) and searching for a word, the output from the search function is a list of words with apparently incorrect character encoding.
> >
> > I get the same result when compiling directly the exported tex file. However, if I remove the line:
> >
> > \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
> >
> > the compiled pdf becomes correctly interpreted by the search function. According to the documentation of the org-article latex class, "There is no facility to disable loading fontenc".
> 
> That seems odd to me.  Can you provide an ECM, a minimal complete example, that 
> causes this problem?
> 
> Bill
> -- 
> William Denton ¡ê  Toronto, Canada ¡ê  https://www.miskatonic.org/